Anatomy of a web site

Cyber-Sierra Workshop 2002: Web Site Power

Basic Page Anatomy
| Index | Basics | Prepare | Web 101 | Anatomy | Check It |

There are basic features that every page should have.

Every page should have a useful title. Titles not only tell the visitor something about the page, the title is used by search engines, too. Each word is important. This particular USFS page has also been BOBBY Approved..

From the HTML side, you can see the page title, and the META TAGS. Meta tags are used by search engines to determine key words. Select keywords that you think visitors may use to find you. Ideally you create different tags for each page, particularly if you plan to use a search engine onsite. Get specific because no one will wade through 600,000 possibilities to find you.

In source view see the meta tags in HTML

Every page should tell you where you are geographically. I won't embarrass anyone but there are a whole lot of conservation district web sites that don't mention what state they are located in, the county or town. Design a footer that accomplishes that task which you can incorporate into the page templates.

Example of a locational footer

DISTRICT NAME
MAILING ADDRESS
PHONE, FAX NUMBERS AND EMAIL name@example.yyy

This page is located at: http://www.example.yyy/folder/index.htm
Main Menu is at: http://www.example.yyy/index.htm

It's important to have the absolute address somewhere on the page in case the page gets printed or saved to file. It's very frustrating to have an important piece of information that you can't relocate simply because there was no location identification on the page. You can also accomplish this by using an absolute link navigation set at the bottom of the page, too.

Note: An absolute address as a link (URL) is the full path name of the file: http://www.domain.yyy/folder/filename.htm. A reletive address uses just the filename or folder and filename such as filename.htm or folder/filename.htm. Be careful that your WYSIWYG editor does not use the C drive in the file name (a frequent error).