With business websites constantly increasing in size and complexity, we need some strategies to ease the management headaches. This article describes how to handle large, complex web sites.

Tactics for website management

by Veronica Yuill

Once upon a time, when the web was very young, enthusiastic amateurs put stuff on web pages and made it look nice, armed only with a text editor and a copy of Paintshop Pro. Things are very different nowadays -- if a recent survey by Inter@ctive Week is to be believed, the average website is now run by 99 people. It's no longer enough to throw together half a dozen static pages with a guestbook and call it a corporate website -- you are expected to provide a dynamic, interactive, customer-centered, proactive (fill in any extra buzzwords here) experience. Funnily enough, although most websites nowadays look much more sophisticated and provide more functionality than in days of yore, the tools we use to create them haven't evolved that much. Many are the designers who boast, "I use Notepad to create all my sites -- why pay for a fancy editor when all you need to do is code HTML?". WYSIWYG editors are for wimps, with the greatest contempt being reserved for Microsoft's Front Page.

The trouble with this argument is that for anything more than the most trivial site, just coding HTML (or Javascript, or DHTML, or Flash) is no longer enough. Any website with more than two links in it is not just a collection of pages -- it's an information system. Modern HTML editors like Dreamweaver, Homesite, and NetObjects Fusion make it much easier for the skilled designer to create attractive pages, but designing a site that's easy to manage is another matter altogether. Hands up those who have been asked to add a new section to an existing site, and realized that to do so they need to make changes to scores or even hundreds of pages! Worse, hand-coding and incremental changes have introduced inconsistencies which prevent a simple global search and replace operation.

Many web designers, not surprisingly, have an artistic rather than a systems background. It's only natural for them to get more excited about the way their favorite editor lets them manipulate the appearance of a page than they do about its site management features (or lack of them). But an unmanageable site is not necessarily the fault of the designer -- it's the nature of the web to provide unforeseen challenges! With business websites constantly increasing in size and complexity, we need some strategies to ease the management headaches.

Think it through

The best time to get a site management system in place is at the start of the project, before a single line of code has been written. This is also the time to think about what the site will look like in, say, two years' time. If you are thinking of adding e-commerce features, creating discussion forums, or taking advertising, plan for that now. Think about where banners will go, how you will manage inventory, how frequent updates will be, who will be responsible for keeping content up to date. And ensure that the development budget takes into account the need for ongoing maintenance of both content and style elements (such as templates, style sheets, and graphics).

Document, document, document

Programmers hate doing documentation. But they know it has to be done; and they appreciate its benefits when they need to edit a particularly incomprehensible piece of code written by someone who has long ago moved on to other things. Before a line of HTML has been written, or a single page mock-up done, the web development team should create flowcharts and blueprints outlining the structure of the site and its navigation system. These working documents will ultimately determine the basic structure which will be used for every page on the site.

At the micro-management level, you should end up with a list of all the pages which need to be created, and the elements they must include. This list can be used to allocate tasks and manage the development process. If you are feeling really flash, you'll feed this list into a database and impress everyone with customized progress reports. A one- or two-person team can easily manage the list in a word processor or spreadsheet.

Use the tools you've got

Say what you like about Front Page (and I do!), at least Microsoft has recognised the need for site management tools -- the latest version includes some nifty sitewide reporting features. It also simplifies the task of renaming or moving pages within the site, and detecting and repairing broken links. Packages like Dreamweaver and NetObjects Fusion provide similar facilities.

Most web developers who work on large sites have by now discovered the enormous benefits of include files and stylesheets, both of which ensure that pages are consistent, and make sitewide changes to appearance or navigation a snap. Web design packages like the ones above also allow you to create standard page templates which can be distributed to members of the development team.

For complex sites, you'll also find dedicated tools to do link-checking, generate site maps, report on orphan pages, provide version control, and assist with many other management tasks.

Database it

Perhaps one of the most dramatic changes in website development in the last couple of years is the ease with which content can now be served from a database. Relatively easy to learn technologies like ASP and PHP, combined with the power of relational databases and XML, have put this possibility within reach of even the smallest business. For large, dynamic sites such as news and e-commerce sites, this is the only way to go. Once the initial effort has been put into designing a flexible, efficient database structure, designers are freed to concentrate on delivering attractive, feature-rich pages, confident in the knowledge that if the CEO demands a WebTV-compatible site tomorrow, and a WAP-enabled one the day after, it can be done without disrupting any of the existing material.

Web design is no longer simply the art of producing great-looking pages, though that's important. For a website to be successful in the long term, it's the management of the infrastructure that really counts.

© Archetype IT Ltd, 2000

Veronica Yuill is Development Manager for Archetype IT, a web development company with offices in France and the UK. She lives in rural France and works on web sites and other Internet-related projects for clients around the world. With fifteen years' experience of systems analysis and programming, Veronica specialises in creating dynamic, database-driven websites. She also teaches on a ground-breaking online degree course offered by the UK-based Open University. When not gazing at a computer screen, she spends her time enjoying the Mediterranean way of life. Her ambition is to continue to learn something new every day.