The N7NB Files
Stages of site construction
There are three stages to site construction (pictured below). The structure diagram is intended to show the link structure of the site. Doubtless there's a standard way to draw these, but what I intended to show here was the direction and hierarchy of links on the site. The second slement of site construction is the wireframe which shows the layout areas of the page. There are two of these for this site, one with and the other without animation areas. The third element of site construction is the design complsite which is an image file of the way the page will look. There are two of these for this site, one for main pages and the other for subnavigation pages.
If you've never designed anything before, the usefulness of wireframes isn't obvious. But for Web designers they serve to help clarify which of many possible design approaches will be most effective. The wireframes depicted here show only the main content areas, and give an indication of where "zoomed" images will appear.
The goal of the design composite is to look as much like the proposed page as possible. In the comps for this site, I actually wrote text for the comp and made a link to show how the zoom feature would work. In fact, the actual code for the zoom feature is based on exactly what I did in the comp to mock up the feature.
What is a template?
A template is a "blank page" into which you type your content. QTH.com offers several templates with themes that are appropriate to amateur radio
A content management system (CMS) is a special kind of template made for dynamic sites like blogs. These pages use server scripts to dish up the data the user requests during a visit.