Our web site serves many purposes, including:
- Internal
- Communication between members of the College Park community.
- Alerts to upcoming events.
- Records of past events, with news items evolving into history.
- External
- Acquainting people with College Park, its character, and its missions.
- Informing people of the activities and services of our church.
- Proclaiming the good news of Jesus Christ.
The purposes lead to the following principles:
- Permanence. Aside from portal pages, web pages should be a permanent record of events in the church. With very, very few exceptions, web pages should never be taken down. Because other web sites around the world may link to our pages, pages should never be moved. In the rare event that a page must be moved, a placeholder page should be put in its place explaining the removal or redirecting the viewer to the page with current content.
- Clarity. Be aware that not everyone reading the page is a church member or knows our activities well. Include enough description so that someone encountering College Park for the first time via the page will be able to understand.
- Ease of navigation. Those viewing our site, whether members or first time visitors, should be able to find their way around quickly and easily. Those with perceptual difficulties should also be able to navigate easily.
The above principles suggest the following practices:
Directory structure
Plan directory structures from at least a fifty-year perspective. If you continue adding pages as you are doing now, what will the directory look like in fifty years? Will it be huge? Think about ways to break the content into first major subdirectories and then each directory into smaller subdirectories.
Examples:
/Youth/20/06/YouthCamp for stories from the 2006 Youth Camp. Having even one directory per year under /Youth may be dividing too finely. Consider first a decade directory (/Youth/20) followed by a year directory (/Youth/20/06) and only then adding the subject directory.
Add top level directories only with great reluctance. The top level directory is already rather crowded.
Use common header files with navigational elements
Your page should use "include" statements to add the button bar. An "include" statement allows you to insert the contents of a different file into your HTML. Not only does this save the work of programming a complex button bar on every page, it also makes it possible to alter the button bar at a later date and have all pages updated automatically.
From the perspective of a person visiting the site, a consistent navigation bar can do much to make it easier for a person to find what they want.
There are currently two such statements you should include to get the button bar to work:
In the "head" section of your html:
<!--#include virtual="/headtags.html"-->Following the </head> statement and in lieu of the <body> statement,
<!--#include virtual="/bodytags.html"-->You may enter these by choosing "Split" in the editing window in Dreamweaver.Use style sheets
Maintain uniformity of fonts and highlighting of links by using cascading style sheets. At the time this page was written, we have two such pages: /white.css and /black.css. You can attach these to your page using Dreamweaver; just choose Text > CSS Styles > Manage styles. Then navigate to one of these files in the top directory of the web site.
We generally use a white background for most pages, but a black background for photo galleries. Photos usually are better viewed against a black background.
Use "Alt" tags
Be sensitive to the needs of visitors who are visually impaired. One of the most important thing to do is to include an "alt" tag for every image that you include, describing its content.
Use Title, Keywords, and Description
The meta-tags "title", "keywords", and "description" allow us to help search engines index our content.
You can edit the "head" section directly to include these, or you can use Dreamweaver's Insert toolbar. Using Insert, choose the HTML tab, and then from the Head icon, select keywords or description.
In Keywords, enter a list of possible search terms someone might use looking for this page.
In Description, enter what you would like the search engine to display when it presents your page to the person doing the search.
In the "title" box, add a descriptive title. This is the page title displayed by search engines.
Well chosen title, keywords, and description will make it much easier for people to find the pages they want.
Always provide a link to our home page
There are two important reasons to do this. First, it helps people get to our main page after they have burrowed deeply into our site.
Secondly, the search engines use link structure to determine importance. If many pages that mention College Park link to http://www.collegeparkbaptist.org, then Google will deduce that someone searching for that name probably wants our site.
File and directory names should only include alphabetical characters, the digits 0-9, underscore ("_), and hyphen ("-"). Other characters can cause problems in some applications.
Instead of starting each page from scratch, you can use another as a starting point and avoid having to enter the button bar information.
- Find a similar page, preferably on a similar topic.
- "Copy" the page and "paste" it back into the same directory.
- Drag and drop the copy to the directory where you want the new page.
- Rename the file to the name you wish to use.
- Delete any extraneous content.
After doing this, your button bar will already be in place, and your style sheet will already be attached.
You will also have copied your title, keywords, and description, so go into the <head> section and correct these.