Before you build your Web site, you may want to consider its organization. While more than likely you have thought of many ways of organizing your Web site’s structure, you have probably thought about it from a navigational perspective. In addition to thinking about it from that angle, I would suggest that you also think about your Web site’s structure from a maintenance point of view. What can you do to make your Web site easier to maintain? What conventions will simplify the structure of your pages?

The result of this early structuring process will help you set a standard to guide your efforts. Now that you have your server up and running, it would be a good opportunity to consider a few of the issues involved. By no means, is this the only approach that you can use. Any thought-out logical system should serve you equally well. Many of the ideas presented here are used at accessLINK, inc., a small Web presence provider where I spend many hours of my day. AccessLINK develops several small- to medium-sized Web sites per week and maintains a few more on a daily basis. This article presents some of the ideas that I use for organizing our work. I will also address some other services, such as automatic support for personal Web pages, that your users will want you to implement.

Organizing your Web site is not about structuring a Web site so that visitors can find their way around. It’s something you do for yourself; it’s your filing mechanism. If you follow a few basic guidelines, the maintenance of your Web site will be much easier. Upgrading to new versions of the software will be a snap, and other administrative chores such as backups will require less time and effort.

AccessLINK’s servers are closely guarded because they all have close control what goes into the servers. We don’t have end users setting up their own sites or writing their own programs. Because of this, accessLINK’s needs are bound to be a little different from yours, but many of their structuring methodologies will help you build a better site. They are a Web presence provider. Simply put, they’ll put your company on the Web. Their services range from designing and building a site, to hosting your site on one of their servers, all while maintaining the same look and feel you would have if you had a Web server running in your own network. They handle all the issues a company faces when it first gets on the Net.

When you are building a site in-house, the responsibility for building and maintaining it will fall in the hands of the System Administrator. System Administrators are usually overworked, and to add to their responsibilities, the managing of a Web site of any size may be beyond some organization’s means or policy. When possible, it is fair to say, the better prepared you are to maintain the site, the less bumpy the entire process will be. You should take it as a rule that unless you have a static Web site—one that won’t change very often—development accounts for less than a third of the effort. Maintenance and future modifications comprise the real bulk of time.

Security Concerns

Addressing security concerns is a very time-consuming task (not to mention costly). I find that many customers just want to get online and have someone else deal with the associated security problems. Security is the number one concern, and it should be because there’s a lot to worry about. Setting up a Web site is like opening a window into your network. Many people will be very happy to window-shop. Others will try to snoop to see what they can find, and still others will try to force the window open. Scary.

Security concerns for a small to medium organization are not addressable in hours, and the costs associated are not small. Privacy of information and peace of mind are important. Just think about all the information that is stored on your systems. What sort of problems would you have if these records ended up in the wrong hands? What would happen if a vandal destroyed or corrupted your data?

To think about the security implications, without combining it with the pressure to be published on the Internet, is a good thing. Most organizations should not even consider going on the Internet unless they have implemented some sort of network security, such as a firewall. If you have pressure, go find a Web server provider to host your site while you resolve the security issues. An Internet Service Provider (ISP) is already set up to address these problems. Once you have figured out the implications and you are ready, they will be happy to help you migrate your Web site in-house.