Planning your Web Application

Before starting any project it is important that you plan thoroughly so that you have a good idea of what structure and pages will be required and what their function will be. If your project is a professional project for a client then much of this would have already been completed during the tendering process. If the project is a personal one you should still work out a detailed plan of what will be required. Time invested at this early stage will often save a significant amount of time and effort at later stages. Having a clear idea of what pages will be required, what their function will be and what directory structure is required to support those pages and functions is fundamental to ensuring a clean and efficient development process. The amount of preparation will be dependant on the size of the project but even on the smallest of projects this stage is essential.

As stated during the introduction, my project is to provide a new website for an Aquarium Society and the aim of the site is to promote the Society to the public using the internet. The site will only consist of a handful of pages and a small number of features but each need to be carefully considered at this stage.

There will be a number of pages to relate basic information about the Aquarium Society to the public such as a home page, a club history page and an information page with details of subscriptions and directions to where meetings take place. The site will have a page to display photos taken during club outings and events and a page which offers basic fish keeping advice to beginners. As the photo library will be updated fairly infrequently this may be a static page but could be upgraded to be fully dynamic at a later stage. The site will also have a page showing meeting dates and details of what the meeting will cover. Meetings change fairly frequently so this will need to be a dynamic page that has a management section so that the club secretary can add, update or delete meetings. The site will require a contact page with contact information and a basic form that visitors can complete in order to contact the club. Finally, the site will require a links page and site map which can be used to help promote the site on search engines once it is up and running. As the site will have an area for the secretary to update the meeting schedule this part of the application will have to be password protected and we will require an area which is secure from public access. We will therefore require a page to logon authorised users and a further page to assist with any lost passwords.

Considering what we have already discussed there are three clear areas or functions within the site, each of which will require its own folder. So we will designate three folders – pages, management and logon to hold these pages. Further folders will be required to hold images, style sheets and any user controls that we develop so I will create three further folders called images, styles and controls respectively.

The basic page layout will consist of a header section with links to other pages, a central area which contains the page information and a footer section. The header and footer will remain consistent throughout this web application and will be the same on every page. All of the public pages will be styled using a single style sheet to ensure a consistent look throughout the site and to enable global changes to the style of the site in a quick and easy fashion. A second style sheet will be required to style the management portion of this web application as this section will be more functional and will not require the colour and graphics applied to the rest of the site.

Although this structure may well evolve in the future and I am certain that some of the folders will be further sub-divided according to requirements, starting off with this basic structure should provide us with a simple foundation on which to start developing while maintaining a well organised and tidy structure. If you don’t get into the habit of completing this basic planning then I suspect that as you move onto more advanced and complicated web applications things will become very complex and disorganised.

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