Planning a site’s logical structure
The logical structure of a site is the map of relationships among the documents in the site. It is the hierarchy of “parent” and “child” documents. A site’s logical structure can be visualized as a tree, like a family tree, although when describing Web sites the tree is commonly shown inverted, with its root at the top and branches and leaves below. A site’s home (index) page is at the topmost level. Immediately below it are the home page’s immediate “children”; in the case of a company site, these could be the index pages for Products, Services, Support, and so forth. In turn, each of these first-level children might have its own children, and so on.
Logical structure of a hypothetical small business site
Deciding on the logical structure of a site means deciding how to organize its documents into groupings and relationships that make sense to you and to your users. There are many ways to organize a site, and it is not always obvious which of two alternatives is best. Should there be two branches, one for Products and another for Services, or should both be combined in one branch? Should Updates fall under Support, or should there be a separate Updates page under each product?
Of course, you can always put links in one document to any other document, regardless of their relative locations in the site tree. However, many sites can be organized into “natural” groupings: for instance, product pages naturally fall into a “Products” category. When deciding what the children of a particular document should be, ask yourself what the most important links in that page will be. In most cases, the children of that document should be the pages those primary links point to.
The site tree and dynamic navigation bars
In the case of an ordinary Web site, the site tree is a theoretical construct. It doesn’t exist anywhere but in the mind of the developer, or perhaps in a planning document. But when you use a local siteA managed collection of documents, folders, and resource files on the local file system that you intend to publish as a single Web site. in Namo WebEditor, you can explicitly build a site tree for your site. This site tree serves a concrete purpose: its structure determines the destinations of the links in any dynamic navigation bars you put in your documents.
Unlike an ordinary hyperlink, which always points to the same document (by its path and file name) regardless of where the document is in the site tree, a link in a dynamic navigation bar points to whatever document is in a specific place in the tree. If you replace that document with another document (that has a different path and/or file name), Namo WebEditor automatically updates the link to point to the new file. For example, you might have a dynamic navigation bar in which the links point to the children of the current document. If you replace one of the child documents—let’s say you replace superwidge.html with humunga.html—Namo WebEditor will automatically change the link pointing to superwidge.html so that it now points to humunga.html. Namo WebEditor similarly updates dynamic navigation bars when you add or remove documents in the site tree.
Dynamic navigation bars are powerful tools. If you plan and build your site tree with care, they can relieve much of the burden of updating links when you change the structure of your site.
Related topics
Planning a site’s folder structure