This month, I though I’d talk about MasterBorders, but, as any writer will tell you, what you start off planning to write and what you end up with are often very different—this applies here. :)

With any good project you need to start with a plan. The same thing goes for planning your Web site. When you think about planning your site, it is key to remember the important elements that go beyond just the look of the site and the colors you choose. Lets take a look at some things to consider.

BIG PICTURE STUFF

See what your Web host, or your client’s host, has to offer
Most hosts provide the basics—a place to host your site. But if you plan on having forms on your site, or e-commerce, or database abilities now or in the future, it’s best to make sure your host has the things you need. For example:

• Forms. Does your host provide a means to process forms such as included form scripts or ways to upload and use your own, or will you have to rely on a 3^rd-party solution provider?
• E-commerce. If you or your client wants to sell something, does your host have the facilities to provide you with a way to set up a secure area on the site, or will you have to farm this out?
• Databases. Does the host support ASP, Cold Fusion, MySQL or PHP? If you want some form of dynamic site, you’ll need that database-support option.
• Popularity. If you have a popular site, make sure you have enough of an allotment for Web traffic. There is nothing worse than having a popular, high-traffic only to find that you are hit with high-traffic charges.
• Support and Uptime. Not an easy thing to find these days. But if you need a site that is up more than it's down, or have questions on how to implement certain functionality, check to see what the host offers for support.

Ah, but don’t just trust their Web site, have a look at www.Deja.com, and search for the host's name in their USENET postings files. I learned a lot about my last host that way … of course it was AFTER I had already learned that they were a bad company to deal with. Also, search the Web as well, I’ve found some great info on hosts there, too.

Of course, like a lot of information on the Web, take it with a grain of salt and do your due diligence—not everything you read is true … except this of course. :)

Finally, expect to change hosts a few times until you find a good one. It’s taken me five tries, and I’m very happy with my current host. I’m fussy and this company exceeds my expectations. :)

What Do You or Your Client Want?
Deciding what you want is pretty easy. You look at sites you like, figure out what you want on your site and go to town. You tweak, you change, you curse, and finally, at least for a short time, you have a site you like. But the client … yikes. That’s a whole other ball game.

When dealing with a client’s Web site, I make a point of asking the following (and this is beyond pricing issues):

• What’s the point of their site? Is the client’s goal to sell something? Do they just want to display information about their company and/or product-service? Ask LOTS of questions. This is a good thing!
   
• Get the client to show you what THEY like. Very important. Nothing worse that designing a site with a look the client doesn’t like. This from experience!
   
• Understand who the target market is for your client? No point doing a clean corporate site if the client’s target market is 16-year old surf punks! ;)

Define Your Structure
When you plan your site, it is crucial that you remember why you are putting your site up in the first place—to deliver information.

Ideally, before you even create a page in NetObjects Fusion, you’ll think about the structure of your site and what is important. I’ll use my business as an example. I provide Web and consulting services, so when I was planning my site I first looked at companies that provided similar services, read some articles on site design and user interfaces, tried to think like a visitor, and then set up my structure. All of the key areas can be hit with one click. So, my structure is like this:

Home

     Contact
     Support

     Services

     Clients

     Projects

     Request a Quote

Yes, there are sub-sections below the above headings, but you get the idea. All the important stuff is a click away, and those links are repeated on each page so the user won’t get lost. Remember to make that key information easy to find and, if possible, at the top level of your site structure. Don't bury the important stuff.

Maximize MasterBorders
Never underestimate MasterBorders. For creating a consistent look between pages and sections of a site, for making quick changes to site sections, MasterBorders are one of NetObjects Fusion's best features.

MasterBorders are your friend! Used thoughtfully they can make managing a large site, and maintaining consistency across it, easy!

By default, when you start a site in NetObjects Fusion, there is one MasterBorder applied to the site, and on each page there are four MasterBorder regions top, bottom, left, and right. When an object is placed in a MasterBorder, it will appear in that location on all pages using that MasterBorder. You can guess that for things like footers, navigation, and repeating elements, MasterBorders are invaluable. All the sites I’ve built use MasterBorders extensively.

When you click in the MasterBorder region, the indicator in the top left corner turns red. The MasterBorder properties will then be available in the Properties Palette.

You can adjust the width of MasterBorders in the palette, or drag the handles available on the page rulers.

Each MasterBorder region can be turned off individually, or they can all be turned off together by selecting "zero margins".

NOTE: If you are placing an object on the page and it overlaps the MasterBorder, the object may "snap" into the MasterBorder region disrupting your layout. Don't panic—just drag it back out into the Layout Region.

To get maximum benefit from MasterBorders, you usually employ more than one per site ... my business site has about seven—each section has its own, and all pages within that section share the same MasterBorder. A common implementation is one MasterBorder per site section/level. Adding and applying MasterBorders is easy—it's all done via the Add/Edit button and the MasterBorder properties. If you haven’t used them, it’s time to try!

Make Your Site User-friendly
Web site visitors aren’t the most patient bunch – especially the ones, like me, that don’t have a high-speed net connection. When visiting a web site a visitor is looking for information and they don’t want to wait for a few minutes to find it because your site’s home page is a 300K behemoth!  Here are a few things you can do to keep your site user-friendly:

Reuse graphics as much possible. A browser stores images in a cache file for use later. So, if you use similar graphics, subsequent pages that use the same graphics will load faster. Also, as I’ve said in other columns, ensure that you use the correct format for the graphic type—think GIF for line art and things with minimal color and JPG for photos and images with lots of colors.

Provide text links. When in a hurry, the first thing I look for are the text links so I can skip the eye candy and get to the creamy filling … sorry, Twinkie moment. :)

Make the important stuff a click away. Yes, I know I just said that a few paragraphs ago, but you’d be amazed at some sites that bury things like, oh, contact information or what exactly the point of their site is. It’s kind of like looking up a company in the yellow pages only to find this great ad that neglects to show a phone number or way to contact the company. Doah!

Skip the unnecessary clutter. And what do I classify as clutter? Well, how about:

• Flashy animation that serves no purpose but to either keep the user from getting into your site or distract the user with things that bounce and move. If you have animation, make sure it is there for a reason.
   
• HUGE backgrounds that take a bazillion years to load and server no purpose but distracting the user—very bad when the background repeats itself in a confusing manner.
  
  Now, coming from me, one who does use backgrounds as containers, this sounds rather hypocritical, but I always try and make sure the background has a purpose and doesn’t unnecessarily repeat or take too long to load.
   
• Sound files that reside on the site purely because they can be there. If the sounds serve a purpose, great, if not, rethink their use, or at least give the user a way to nix the files if they don’t want to hear them.
   
• Plug-ins. Okay, some things, like Flash animations, Acrobat PDFs, and sound files often require plug-ins. That’s fine, but don’t force your user to download one in order to get around your site or worse yet, get into your site. Just bad form.

Site Maintenance
If the site you are working on isn’t too big, or doesn’t have content that changes very often, then site maintenance isn’t much of an issue. Need to make a change? Pop NetObjects Fusion open, make the change, publish it, then you are done.

One thing to note, and this is more of a housekeeping issue that I do with my sites, is what to do was your site changes.

Archiving
Being a bit of a paranoid computer user, and one who also remembers my whoppingly huge 20 MB hard drive and the limited space associated with it, I  tend to archive things with some frequency—either by zipping up old work or burning it to a CD. In the case of NetObjects Fusion sites, I tend to archive my sites with some frequency.

Making Changes
If I make a change to site content, either by adding or removing pages, changing the look, what have you, I export the site as a template to a new directory and rename that template with today’s date in the name. So, something like: myclients_site_Feb_21_2001a.NOD.

From this template I continue with my building or maintenance.

With the “old” site, I zip up the directory and put it either in an archive directory or onto a CD. When you do this, make a point of naming the directory using an easily recognizable file name. Something like: myclients_site_Feb_20_2001.zip

The reason is that if you need to go back to the site at a later date, I can easily find the site file. Plus zipping up saves space and exporting as a template cleans up the .NOD file.

Sharing Site
As you likely know, only one person can access a single .NOD file at one time, so the best situation I can think of to have multiple users work on one site is to assign each user a section of the site and have them only work on their section.

When I was writing a column for the eFuse site I did such a thing . Here's what happened:

1. Daniel Will-Harris of eFuse fame designed the look and feel of the site and created a template of that look and feel, with all needed graphics. He also implemented the structure of the site and maintained the main area of the site—the authors of the other sections maintained their sub-sections.
    
2. He sent a template to me for my section, and I built the section based on the template and text settings supplied by Daniel.
    
3. The template contained a simple structure that I built my section upon. It also contained all the necessary publishing settings so all I had to do come publishing time was to publish the site to my section.

For example, Daniel may publish to:

http://www.efuse.com/

So, when he publishes, he updates the Home page and any sections he controls. He also set up links to my yet unpublished section on eBiz. Daniel never actually published a section called eBiz he just set the placeholder for it. Publishing the eBiz section was up to me.

Basically, I was but one cog in the big eFuse machine. And this was a system that Daniel used for many contributors to eFuse. So, while we really are working on one big site, in actuality, or in the eyes of NetObjects Fusion, we are working on two separate sites that join up.

There I go, another epic—what used to be “tips” now seems to have turned into a “novella". :)

Happy building!

David