Bring Discipline to Your Web Site.

WEB development; TEXT files; STANDARDS; HTML (Document markup language); ELECTRONIC data processing documentation

This article introduces several techniques for developing and maintaining Web sites. Standards for text styles should include the fonts, sizes and colors to be used for various features such as titles, subtitles, logos, content text, links and administrative information. Page layout and page properties should identify the location and sizes of the various elements that make up Web pages on the site, as well as features like background colors and images. Coding conventions should specify the hypertext markup language (HTML) version, the use of comments in the code, which HTML editors use, and the use of upper or lower case. Site documentation should record the relationships between folders and files as they exist on the server, the navigation logic between the site documents, the standards discussed and sample Web pages or page layouts to be used as models. A list of the standards to be applied to the site, sometimes called a style guide or style sheet when applied primarily to style features, is critical if more than one person prepares Web documents and will prove valuable even for sites maintained by only one person. Techniques that facilitate the use of common elements include the use of page templates that already contain the elements; server side includes, which automatically insert common code into Web pages when they are served; and cascading style sheets, which specify common styles for pages.