HTML and CSS Reference
In-Depth Information
How about a less task-oriented example? Suppose that you want to create a set of web
pages about a particular rock band because you're a big fan, and you're sure other fans
would benefit from your extensive knowledge. Your topics might be as follows:
The history of the band
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Biographies of each of the band members
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A
discography
(all the albums and singles the band has released)
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Selected lyrics
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Images of album covers
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Information about upcoming shows and future albums
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You can come up with as many topics as you want, but try to keep each topic reasonably
short. If a single topic seems too large, try to break it up into subtopics. If you have too
many small topics, try to group them together into a more general topic heading. For
example, if you're creating an online encyclopedia of poisonous plants, having individual
topics for each plant would be overkill. You can just as easily group each plant name
under a letter of the alphabet (A, B, C, and so on) and use each letter as a topic. That's
assuming, of course, that your visitors will be looking up information in your encyclope-
dia alphabetically. If they want to look up poisonous plants by using some other method,
you'd need to come up with another system of organization, too.
Your goal is to have a set of topics that are roughly the same size and that group together
related bits of information you have to present.
At this point, you should have a good idea of what you want to talk about and a list of
topics. The next step is to actually start structuring the information you have into a set
of web pages. Before you do that, however, consider some standard structures that have
been used in other help systems and online tools. This section describes some of these
structures, their various features, and some important considerations, including the
following:
The kinds of information that work well for each structure
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How visitors find their way through the content of each structure type to find what
they need
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How to make sure that visitors can figure out where they are within your docu-
ments (context) and find their way back to a known position
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