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Managing Your Static Website |
You have been working hard on your website, visitor numbers have been steadily increasing and your site is rapidly increasing in size, suddenly keeping track of everything can become a monumental task. There are a number of options you can implement to decrease your workload thereby making site-wide updates easier.
A major challenge facing the majority of webmasters is updating every single page on their site, for example when you update your navigation bar or copyright information. For a few years, frames were used to make this updating easier but frames are not the best way of using your site. Luckily there are several other ways of making site-wide updates.
As you don’t have to physically change any part of your website, the quickest to implement is the use find & replace tool. Using this option all you need to do is place the particular piece of your old code in the 'find' box and the corresponding new code into the 'replace' box. Provided that your code is consistent throughout the website, the program will update all your site's files. A drawback using this option is when there are inconsistencies in the code or if each page is different, in which case, the find & replace it will not work. You also run the risk of making an error and ruining your site.
Another option is to utilise features of your web design software specifically designed for this purpose. For instance, Macromedia Dreamweaver, includes a feature called 'Templates' which will allow you to make a 'template' for your site. When set-up, updating of specific areas of the template will automatically update the same areas in any other pages created using the template. Other programs also offer similar features.
A final option to update your site quickly is to use Server Side Includes (SSI). These are special tags you can place within your code which will cause the web server to insert information of your choice. This can be output from a CGI script, a piece of server information (time etc.) or the contents of a file. For instance, you could create a file containing your sites navigation and insert the text file as a SSI instead of physical code on your pages. You can then either use the built in tool to insert SSI or you can hand code <!--#include virtual="/directory/filename.txt"--> to include this information on the site.
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