- What Type of Site Do You Want to Build?
- Learning From Sites You Go To
- Website Goals
- Organizing Websites
- Best Practices of Website Organization
Learning From Sites You Go To
As I mentioned earlier, you might need to try a new perspective to see the web for its structure rather than just its content. The following exercise forces you into that perspective and lets you see websites you visit in new ways:
Open your browser and look in your web history, which is a list of websites you have been to recently. It is usually found in a menu item. In Internet Explorer or Firefox, use Ctrl+Shift+H (see Figure 3.4).
Figure 3.4 Firefox with History open.
- Open the last few sites you have visited.
As you go through each site, ask yourself
- What type of website is this?
- What makes up the parts of the website?
- How do you move between pages?
- What gives you a sense that this website is one complete site and distinct from other sites on the internet?
You might even take notes on these websites. What makes these sites work? Or better yet, if you find a bad website, figure out what makes it bad and don’t make the same mistakes. Can you map out the structure of the website on a piece of paper?