Pages

Thursday, August 30, 2012

Planning the site - File naming and URL’s – Directory structure

Web designs are growing increasingly complex, and keeping a visitor’s attention is getting harder and harder. Thinking about it from the perspective of a Web surfer, there are a few key things to consider these questions:

When you visit a site, how long do you wait for a page to load before you become impatient and close down the window? How much are you willing to read on a page before it becomes too “wordy”? How many times can you watch the same spiffy graphic on a page before it becomes boring? What color combinations quickly become irritating or hard to read?

Plan and Design Your Site
When you begin to build a data-driven site, it becomes more important than ever that you take the time to plan and design your site. Too many people jump right into building pages without properly considering the details of what they plan to do. Not only will a lack of planning impact the quality of your final product, it may get you into a sticky situation with a client whose ideas about the site were different than yours. Building a Web page is easy, but building a Web application, possibly with a database backend, is no trivial task, and proper planning is a necessity. From the server type to the database type to the language you are going to use—these are all considerations when planning out your Web site. You might have a background in Visual Basic but decide that the features of a ColdFusion site make it more cost-effective to do the site in ColdFusion. Or maybe you have access to JSP and MySQL but only know ASP. Dreamweaver MX 2004 works with five server technologies, so the environment is friendly to whichever server you choose.

Once you’ve decided on a course of action, however, you can’t easily change midstream. Dreamweaver doesn’t have any built-in functionality for changing from one server technology to another or from one language to another if you are building an ASP site. It pays to plan your site in detail before building the pages. Although the techniques for building the pages are the same, the code that’s used in creating the functionality in the five server models is completely different.

File naming & URL=’s
The following should be guaranteed:

  • Unique and meaningful names for all files, displaying some basic information about its content.

Example: NUMDAM [[13] ] uses a file naming scheme like

for journal volumes: journal-acronym_year_series_volume_issue         for articles: volume-id_first-page_order

(different fields separated by '_'). This scheme allows to assign to any possible NUMDAM file (at logical units level: serial, volume, issue, article) a unique ID, making it robust and general.

  • Conventions for file name length have to be obeyed.

  • File name conventions should be made public for each DML server.
Explanation: Since there will be numerous single DML projects, and since it seems too optimistic to expect that there will be a unique naming scheme for all projects/servers, a prefixing method identifying the project/server is recommended.

  • Stable URLs for all documents.
  • Stable and possibly uniform appearance of web pages for all servers (possibly organized in a Math-Net like manner) (ordering scheme governed by MSC 2000 [[1] ]),
  • Uniform access techniques for all documents,

Directory structure
In computing, a directory structure is the way an operating system's file system and its files are displayed to the user. Files are typically displayed in a Hierarchical tree structure.

Filenames and extensions
A filename is a special kind of string used to uniquely identify a file stored on the file system of a computer. Before the advent of 32-bit operating systems, file names were typically limited to short names (6 to 14 characters in size). Modern operating systems now typically allow much longer filenames (more than 250 characters per path name element).

No comments:

Post a Comment