What Parts of the Site Will Be Reused?

When you consider the Web site, you should look at all content and all of the structure and consider what is reusable, and what should be used only once. When considering this, it could be thinking of simply the layout of the page, or it could be simply what data is displayed, or it could be a consideration of a certain piece of data displaying in a certain way.

Because there are so many ways of arranging and reusing the different parts of the site, it may be helpful to look at these examples of organization and reuse to think about while you consider your own Web site.

In a typical Web site, there is the navigation on the left, the banner graphic on top, and a large central area with the information on the page itself. We would expect that the banner and the navigation should be on all pages, so this would be placed on the page template itself. But the information in the middle will obviously be different from page to page. This is where the considerations are most important.

The way the information is organized is the most important consideration. When you look at one page, it may have objects arranged in one column, or in an array, or broken up with images. It's possible to arrange everything in one placeholder, but there is the other aspect, where you can create smaller sections, each with its own smaller contributor data file.

Consider a page on your Web site that would list open employment positions. You could create the page such that it is one placeholder, listing all internal positions and all external positions. Or you could create a subtemplate within that placeholder (which would then contain separate placeholders and region templates, and so forth), so that the external positions would be stored separately from the internal positions. Each could be maintained in a separate contributor data file, so that the external Web site would contain only the external announcements, and the internal Web site would contain both the contributor data file with external announcements and the one with internal announcements.

Another use would be where each department in the company could list their own job openings; then, on one central page, you could collect all of those individual openings and display them all. In these instances, you can use a subtemplate to easily manage the differing numbers of placeholders.

Other considerations for how you lay the data out on the page, and how to organize the placement of the data within the Web site, needs this kind of consideration on a page by page basis.

You should consider these questions: Would it be best to use one placeholder on the page template, then use a subtemplate to break that placeholder up into parts? Or would it be better to have a few more page templates to allow for different placeholder arrangements?

Another example would be an instance where you have a small piece of information that does not necessarily need a separate page, but you would definitely want to reuse. An example of this could be stockholder contact information, or possibly job application information, separate from typical corporate contact information. The information is not enough to necessarily warrant its own page.

In all of these cases, the page template would be the same. It would have the banner, the navigation, a footer, and then in the middle, the placeholder representing the area that can be replaced and filled with any information you need, structured exactly as you need it. It was the consideration of how to use a subtemplate to further use a placeholder or multiple placeholders within that template that enables you to keep the single look that you need for all pages.

It would also be possible to achieve this layout with different page templates on each page. Again, it depends on how you plan your site.

As you can see, the most important part of the site creation is to figure out how each portion of the Web site, both in terms of structure and content, is displayed. With Site Studio, the more time you invest in planning before you create, the less time you spend creating the hundreds and even thousands of pages your Web site delivers.