Most personal Web pages are built by one person who controls everything, from the content to the look and feel to the contacts to the maintenance schedule. But with a business Web site, many of these functions are handled by different groups, different people, and even people spread out in different areas of the country or the world. The About Web Design/HTML Web site is a typical business Web site in that respect.
Who Builds the Site?
The About Web Design/HTML site is built by several different people:
- Jennifer Kyrnin (me) writes the content for the site. With some minor exceptions all of the articles, how tos, FAQs, and reviews that are posted to this site are written by me. I also manage the forum and the chat room.
- About designers design the look and feel and the layout of the site. I have nearly no say in how the pages will look, my job is to provide the content, not write HTML.
- About advertising sales along with Google determine the ads that will be placed on the site. I also have no control over the ads or where they are placed on the Web site.
- About support staff handles questions from me about problems as well as questions from the customers about the site. Content questions are forwarded on to me.
- About developers develop tools like the newsletter tool, the class tool, and other back-end tools that only I can see.
The About staff members are located in New York City, while I am located in Seattle, Washington. Even my editor is located in New York, the three hour time difference may not seem like much, but it can be challenging.
Tools Used to Build the Site Content
I actually know very little about how the About designers and developers do their work. So this article will focus on how I get content onto the Web site.
Preferred Tools
I still prefer Macromedia HomeSite 5 to
write my articles. I sometimes use Macromedia
Dreamweaver MX 2004, but for straight writing, I use HomeSite. I use Word to do character
counts of long articles. I need to do this because the About tools impose maximum length
requirements. I use Adobe Photoshop CS for editing graphics.
I write my articles in XHTML. Once I've written an article, I need to convert it to About codes and formats. The About tools use special codes to replace HTML - such as [p] to replace <p> and so on. There are also only a limited number of HTML tags that are allowed in About content. I use a codesweeper in HomeSite to remove the invalid tags, and then I use a script within HomeSite to convert all the remaining HTML tags to square-bracket tags.
Once I've converted my article to the About coded format I have a choice. I can either:
- Use a Web form on About's administration server and copy and paste my article details in to create the article. OR
- Create the article in XML created for About and FTP that XML to the About servers.
This isn't even a question for me. I always convert my articles to XML. Here's the XML for this article. I like keeping my articles in XML because then I always have a copy of what I wrote. Many Guides prefer the Web form, because it's a little easier to use, but I am much faster with XML than with the form - and I don't have to worry about my Internet connection crashing while I'm writing and losing all my work.
The neat thing about how About handles Guide content is that it's all in XML. The Web forms actually create XML. And the XML data is then put into a database. The database only contains the content, there are no ads, no navigation, nothing that the About designers create. This allows About more flexibility because they can take the tagged content (this is a headline, this is the body of the article, etc.) and put it in any format that fits the current style of the site.
When I upload my XML (or another Guide fills out the Web form) a process on the backend is run to create the page with all the appropriate navigation and ads and so on. In fact every time an article is created, an entry is added to the article index.
So, while the Web Design/HTML site is a Web site just like any other, the back-end processes that go into creating it are very different from most personal pages.
