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It is a smart thing to try to save as much time in construction, and later in maintenance time as you can, so you can free yourself more valuable time building great content.

When building a web site, it is important to have a plan to give yourself good direction while you configure your design. Your keyword research for instance, will not only help you increase search engine traffic, it will also help you determine your content and menus. You need to try to cover all reasonable possibilities at the planning stage which will save you time in the long run, and give your site a chance to develop in a reasonable order. You will want to build a menu structure for your site that is ordered and relevant. Firstly, just jot things down on paper while you build a solid idea of where you are going.

When you get to the page design, if you are building from new or upgrading a template, first build just the "index page" and a single "content page" and test in at least these four browsers; Firefox, Opera, Internet Explorer and Netscape. If there are any rendering issues you need to know now, before you have 60 odd pages to change or rebuild. And any new page design you add, test, test, test, before you move on.

When you have a good functional page design developed and you are ready to add new pages and fill them with content, the easy way is to save the previously finished page, then save it again, renaming it as the new page. You can then change all your text and image components as you go, preferably from top to bottom. This will give you an identical page structure for each content page. You can ofcourse have different formats, but using this method for multiples of each style format reduces mistakes, and saves a good deal of time. Make a list of all your changes that are required, and work through them one by one until you are done. Page title, description, keywords, heading, sub heading, body text, images and alt tags etc.

Some templates will come with a cascading style sheet file, ".css", which is an external file that controls the overall look of the site. All the text colors, link colors, font styles, button images etc. These can be changed in one file, which will upgrade the whole site at once. It just means that each page is built with standard text, the "look" is controlled by the external .css file. This is a major time saver for web site maintenance design, if you happen to choose to change the style of your pages at any stage. The main menu of many sites is also controlled by an external file. The same file is used on every page. If you wish to add another item to the menu list, you can just copy and paste one of the previous menu items, change the name and the hyperlink to the new page and you are done. Finished for every page on the site.

You do not necessarily have to build these yourself. They are becoming popular, and are incorporated into the initial template design of many templates you can buy. Full instructions are usually given. No problems or difficult code to learn, just a good web site maintenance design to save you time. The text in Flash files, often used for animated logos can also be controlled by a single standard text file, in this case "flash.txt". This means you can change the logo text at any time with ease to change the promotional message. Again, change one file and upgrade the whole site at once. You do not have to edit the Flash movie file itself, just the text file. Simple and efficient.

Created by Mal Huddleston -- Copyright 2007 Ecommerce Site Builder