through your Web site easy for visitors)? _ How will you accommodate growth and further development of the site? With at least a basic plan for your site, youre in a better position to take advantage of the site-management features discussed in this chapter. Taking the time to get clear on your goals and objectives is time well spent and can save you lots of grief later. Set the tone for successful Web development from the beginning and make sure you spend your precious time, money, and energy on the elements and features that best serve your audience and help you reach your goals. Preparing for Development One of the first things I like to do when Im working on a new site with a group or company is hold a brainstorming session with a few people who understand the goals for the Web site. The purpose of this session is to come up with proposed sections and features for the site. A good brainstorming session is a nonjudgmental free-for-all - a chance for everyone involved to make all the suggestions that they can think of, whether realistic or not. Not discrediting ideas at the brainstorming stage is important. Often an unrealistic idea leads to a great idea that no one may have thought of otherwise. And if you stifle one persons creative ideas too quickly, that person may feel less inclined to voice other ideas in the future. 74 Part II: Looking Like a Million (Even on a Budget) After the brainstorming session, you have a long list of possible features to develop into your site. Your challenge is to edit that list down to the best and most realistic ideas and then plan your course of development to ensure that these ideas all work well together when youre done. Developing a New Site In a nutshell, building a Web site involves creating individual pages and linking them to other pages. You need to have a home page (often called the front page) that links to pages representing different sections of the site. Those pages, in turn, can link to subsections that can then lead to additional subsections. A big part of Web site planning is determining how to divide your site into sections and deciding how pages link to one another. Dreamweaver makes creating pages and setting links easy, but how you organize the pages is up to you. If youre new to this, you may think you dont need to worry much about how your Web site will grow and develop. Think again. All good Web sites grow, and the bigger they get, the harder they are to manage. Planning the path of growth for your Web site before you begin can make a tremendous difference later. Neglecting to think about growth is probably one of the most common mistakes among new designers. This becomes even more serious when more than one person is working on the same site. Without a clearly established site organization and some common conventions for tasks such as naming files, confusion reigns. Managing your sites structure Managing the structure of a Web site has two sides: the side that users see, which depends on how you set up links, and the behind-the-scenes side, which depends on how you organize files and folders. What the user sees The side that the user sees is all about navigation. When users arrive at your home page, where do you direct them from there? How do they move from one page to another in your site? A good Web site is designed so that users navigate easily and intuitively and can make a beeline to the information most relevant to them. As you plan, make sure that users can _ Access key information easily from more than one place in the site. _ Move back and forth between pages and sections.