What Do I Mean By "Subsites"?

When designing a simple web site with only a few pages, navigation and organization are fairly easy to manage. However, the more pages a site has, the more difficult it becomes to manage the site and design navigation options which are intuitive and easy to use.

As I contemplate the various things I want to do with this web site, I realize that it is going to be a large and complex site with a lot of things going on. Even if I avail myself of the latest and best script-based navigational tools, there's still likely to be a point at which the site becomes extremely difficult to manage.

One solution is to create what I call "subsites", which are related sites stored in subfolders of the primary site.

For example, I plan to have a section specifically consisting of numerous pages devoted to various artistic disciplines. So many pages, in fact, that if I were to include immediate access to all of those pages on the navigational bar on the home page of the primary site, that navigational bar would become needlessly complex and confusing.

Instead, a single link could take one to a "subsite" where the home page had a multilevel URL such as www.artisticchristians.com/artisticdisciplines/index.html. Since the Artistic Disciplines subsite would be in a subfolder, it could have its own "home page" separate and distinct from www.artisticchristians.com/index.html. Since it was a subsite, it could have its own distinctive navigational bars, background colors, etc. to distinguish it from the primary site or other subsites.

Individual pages, such as www.artisticchristians.com/artisticdisciplines/music.html or www.artisticchristians.com/artisticdisciplines/drama.html, could each focus on specific aspects of that subsite.

Another example: The online gallery at ArtisticChristians.com will eventually feature numerous different Christian visual artists. I want each artist to have his or her own "home page" which then leads to specific pages pertaining to that artist. So, for example, the home page for an artist named Mark Pettigrew (yours truly) might have a URL such as the following:
www.artisticchristians.com/galleries/mpettigrew/index.html.

If you'll think back to some of the web sites you've visited, you'll realize that this is fairly common practice for large web sites.

The drawback when it comes to having subsites with really long pathnames is that such names don't easily fit onto standard business cards! Fortunately, one possible solution is to register a separate domain name and then set things up so that the short domain name is "forwarded" to another domain name.

If I wished to do so, I could register the domain name of www.marksphotos.com (if that name was available via a domain name registrar such as GoDaddy.com) and then forward that name to a much longer URL such as www.artisticchristians.com/galleries/mpettigrew/photos/index.html!

This page will be used in the future in order to contain links to various subsites I plan to design for the primary site. There will be descriptive information for each of those subsites, and this explanation about subsites will very likely be moved to another page, with a link on this page to that page.

I also plan to add a search engine to the home page, in the future, so that visitors to the site can easily search the entire site. The Site Map page will also provide an excellent way to get a really good overview of all of the primary pages on the site, no matter how complex the site may become.

Some web sites focus on gimmicky but unnecessary things such as Flash animations, while neglecting more important aspects such as creating an effective navigational structure and plan which makes it easy to find what one wishes to find on the site.

Such design choices can sometimes make it extremely frustrating for people to visit the site, especially if they're still using dialup modems to access the site. I want this site to have broad appeal and be accessible to as many people as possible, so my use of bandwidth-stealing elements will be limited to areas where there really isn't a better option in terms of presenting information, or to cases where I have included multiple options, so that people on limited budgets can still do most of what they would like to be able to do without the need to upgrade to the latest and greatest technologies.

While you might think that the above information would only be of interest to web designers, a better understanding of this site will make it easier for everyone to more easily find what they are looking for on this site.