Remakeing Site layout?

Question

I'm makeing a site for a music groups bussiness. But I dont like the way I layed it out since he dont have that many stuff to link to. I had coded it to use frames and such an it looks really bad, any ideas what I could do?

Answer 1

Actually you are in a good position because people will probably have been unable to bookmark your site effectively with frames, so pretty much anything you do will be an improvement in that respect.

Consider using a Content Management System (CMS). They typically use PHP and store content in a database. They take a bit of effort to set up and customize, but once you have one going, you can do all the maintenance from a web browser and your client can do a lot of the content addition and editing themselves. The two most popular general purpose CMS are Joomla! and Drupal.

Even if you choose to use static HTML, you can do a lot to make your site easier to maintain, especially if it grows.

* Use one external style sheet for the entire site for formatting appearance

* Use SSI (server side includes) for common elements, such as footers and navigation bars

* Organize your file structure carefully (use subdirectories to store related files) and use file names that are real words and reflect the page content

* Add a unique title tag and description meta tag for each page

* Follow good practices in your coding and make sure that your pages HTML and CSS validate (http://validator.w3.org/ http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/)

Good luck on your project!

Answer 2

Dump the frames and any tables, and replace them with DIVs. It's important to separate the content from the presentation, i.e. how it looks. To get a good idea of the effect when this is done right, see http://www.csszengarden.com/