Web Design Ethiopia

Sites will grow and change. These changes may not even be under your control. Your site may require maintenance due to link not (links to external sites that go offline or change their addresses), server upgrades, and new browsers that are introduced without total backward compatibility.

Change involves costs and risks. If pages are added or removed, this takes time and cost. It also may introduce errors and inconsistencies into your site.

If these inconsistencies are left unchecked, your site will slowly degenerate, becoming less and less usable.

An architecture style guide can help to maintain a stable architecture throughout the changes. It specifies not only the standards used in the organization and labeling schemes, but also documents the policies, processes, and procedures for making changes and testing them. There are several typical procedures to document.

1. Inserting a new low level content piece. The style guide should document how to update the navigation, generate the new graphics, fix the navbars and titles, examine the need for shortcuts, and perform quality assurance.

2. Inserting a new category, Documentation should include determining what location is appropriate, deciding how many options are too many, and when the architecture needs to be reorganized.

3. Removing pages and/or categories, and saving data being removed in case it needs to be recovered. Documentation should include working with outdated links both internal and external, updating navbars, and performing quality assurance.

4. Archiving out-of-date information (but keeping it live). Old news stories and old product support information may need to remain online even if they’re not actively relevant, necessitating their removal from the primary navigation and placement into an archival section of the site.

5. Your documentation should include updating links and navbars and conforming to a systematic organization and file-naming scheme for archival data.

The cost of these procedures will be influenced by a number of design decisions, including the number, choice, and layout of links on each page, the number of external links, the decision to use text links versus graphics, the overall coherence of the architecture, and whether the site is statically coded or database-driven.

Database-driven sites can automatically generate site maps, indexes, and navigation, which can dramatically reduce costs and ensure a higher level of quality through consistency.

On the other hand, automatically generated site maps and indexes can suffer from some problems, such as including poorly labeled or redundant items, or missing important synonyms and rephrasings.

The style guide should include the rationale for the architecture and provide a labeling scheme for consistently naming new topics. Content policies for pages establish what can be said and how, as well as indicate what can link to where.

For instance, there are frequent battles within companies over what get linked from the home page, the most valuable real estate on the site.

A policy for submitting link requests, and approving, prioritizing, and scheduling them can go a long way toward fairly and rationally resolving these conflicts.
 

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