We’ve went over quite a few different aspects of becoming and being a webmaster and probable one of the most important will be the organizational skills that are learned throughout the webmaster’s track. There are many different organizational styles and techniques, so it’s important to pay attention and learn from others and yourself as we go along. The main way a webmaster will learn about organization will be from your own experiences.

So let’s go over a few basic organizational styles we should take into consideration when building our own web site and of course most of us have seen this before in other web sites. One thing to keep in mind is that 90% of the styles we’ll learn will be sites that are already using these styles and techniques, but they aren’t copyrighted or anything like that and can be used freely for anyone’s web site.

Traditional

The first we’ll look at will be the traditional style of laying out a web site, which most of us are used to and 95% of the web sites use this style of organization.

From the above image we can see a few different areas and these areas will be for different information contained within the site. This is one way to organize a web site and this is just the start, there is a great deal more but for the time being we’ll start with this.

Header

We can see that we have a header, which in most cases just has the name of the site and the name will link back to the home page. Some sites use a horizontal navigational menu in the header, but most simply put something nice with their sites name.

Left Navigation

Then we have a left navigational menu, this is where all of the links within the site will be contained. Normally starting with the most important and going to the least important. There are very many ways we can organize just the navigation menu, but we’ll go over that later.

Body

We then have the news or body section of the site. This is where 90% of our content will go and depending on the page, depends on the type of content displayed. For instance we can have all of our news on the very front page, or new content added to the site and a link to that new content.

Remember this is just a simply layout and will different tremendously from site to site, each will have their own little touches to add to their own site and some will even go with a totally new style. We’ll go over a few more styles in later series.

With each sub-section of the site (header, navigational menu so on…) will have there own little tricks to organizing them. In the next article we’re going to go over some common ways to organize each of these sections and take a look at a few tricks that I’ve learned over the years.