This chapter covers
- Tightly focusing your site’s topic
- Setting a goal
- Creating a hierarchy
- Making good use of links
- Building an effective menu system
Why preplan your website before you start adding text and images? It’s very simple: specifying your topic, deciding on your primary goal, and creating the hierarchy for its pages informs many decisions that you make later.
If you just jump right in and start adding content, it’s almost impossible to effectively focus the site and know what to prioritize. For most of us, that results in an unorganized and chaotic workflow. And the likely outcome is an unorganized and confusing website.
Throughout this book, we’ll describe how to build and modify a practice site. This way, you’ll see how to apply—via real-world examples—the various concepts introduced in each chapter. However, you can just apply the concepts directly to your own website if you prefer.