Managing A Large Website

Get the design right early on...

Running a large website can be a bit of a logistical nightmare. So it is best to plan ahead and future proof your site design.

Sometimes growth is unexpected, and that few pages you started off creating by hand soon becomes unmanageable.

If you are expecting to have fifty pages or more on your site at any stage, you should put the time in now to planning how the site will run and be updated, in order to make it easy and relatively hassle free to update in future.

One of the most important elements of all is to have some sort of template for each page that is included across the site. This is essential. Imagine that you need to remove or add a link to your site navigation for instance, and have 1,000 pages on your site. You can either do it individually on all 1,000 pages (which takes ages - even with a global find and replace) or you can simply update the links in one include file and the rest of the site will update automatically.

There are several ways to achieve this. One is to use a server side include, or SSI. This is quite simple to do and you can find out more with a google search.

If you have knowledge of PHP then you can also use the include command in your pages which is as easy as adding:
include ('my_menu.html');

... and then that menu file will automatically be included at the relevant point in your code.

In addition to the menu, with a larger site it can be a very good idea to run it from a database. This means that pages can be added day to day without using FTP or worrying about formatting or adding HTML. This is usually done through a content management system, which you can build yourself if you have the skills or get a web designer to do. Or alternatively you can use an open source system such as Joomla or Drupal and build your site around that.

You will need to have access to a database, usually the excellent and free mySQL.

If you are planning on running a large site yourself then it is well worth learning basic PHP and mySQL so that you can create your own database driven site.

Give some thought up front to the structure of your database. For many sites this will mean you need several tables.

One table may have the category names and category ids, whilst another may have a list of articles for instance in that particular category, including their content. There is a process called normalisation that is designed to help you get the most efficient structure to your database, and ideally you should remove as much duplication as possible.

In summary, take the time to plan your website up front and where possible put the time and effort in up front to set up a system that is as automated and easy as possible. True, it might take you longer to get your site out there, but releasing a half-baked, poorly designed site a few weeks earlier could end up being a costly and expensive problem to correct in the future.

If you are interested in creating a new large site that you would like to be database driven and content managed, then take a look at some more information on dynamic websites and then get in touch with Clarity Media.

Author: Dan

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Last Updated: Aug 30th 2006

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