Why is Planning Important?
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Planning Your Web Site 4-1
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Planning Your Web Site
Planning is key to building a successful web site with Site Studio. Before you begin inserting text, graphics, and scripts into your page templates, you should ask “What is
the function or role of the site?” Is it a department-level site, a company-wide site, an internal site, an external site? How many users will visit the site? How many users will
contribute to the site? Will there be different security access levels for each contributor? Do you plan to replicate or publish the site? Is the site expected to grow over time?
These are all important questions to ask before you begin. We cannot predict your particular needs, but we can suggest some key points that you should consider before
developing your site:
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Section 4.1, Why is Planning Important?
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Section 4.2, Planning Your Site Hierarchy
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Section 4.3, Planning Your Contribution Model
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Section 4.5, Creating Your Site Assets
4.1 Why is Planning Important?
Proper planning of the web site helps determine how to maximize reusability of the web site through appropriate use and reuse of page templates, subtemplates, and
region templates.
It is important to understand that the more time spent on the planning process, the easier the web site and the site assets are to create and manage. You might think that
there is more time required to plan a managed web site using Site Studio, but the result is much less time spent managing the assets.
Proper planning is vital to making the site easier to run. In the beginning stages, it might seem as if more time is being spent before any pages are complete compared to
older methods of creating a web site. But the results of time spent properly planning the web site makes the construction of it through the site assets much easier, and the
maintenance of the web site, especially when making later changes when the web site is live.
What Parts of the Site Will Be Reused? When you consider the web site, you should look at all content and all of the structure
and consider what is reusable, and what should be used only once. When considering this, it could be thinking of simply the layout of the page, or it could be simply what
data is displayed, or it could be a consideration of a certain piece of data displaying in a certain way.
4-2 Oracle Fusion Middleware Developers Guide for Site Studio for External Applications
Because there are so many ways of arranging and reusing the different parts of the site, it may be helpful to look at these examples of organization and reuse to think about
while you consider your own web site.
In a typical web site, there is the navigation on the left, the banner graphic on top, and a large central area with the information on the page itself. We would expect that the
banner and the navigation should be on all pages, so this would be placed on the page template itself. But the information in the middle will obviously be different from page
to page. This is where the considerations are most important.
The way the information is organized is the most important consideration. When you look at one page, it may have objects arranged in one column, or in an array, or broken
up with images. Its possible to arrange everything in one placeholder, but there is the other aspect, where you can create smaller sections, each with its own smaller
contributor data file.
Consider a page on your web site that would list open employment positions. You could create the page such that it is one placeholder, listing all internal positions and
all external positions. Or you could create a subtemplate within that placeholder which would then contain separate placeholders and region templates, and so forth,
so that the external positions would be stored separately from the internal positions. Each could be maintained in a separate contributor data file, so that the external web
site would contain only the external announcements, and the internal web site would contain both the contributor data file with external announcements and the one with
internal announcements.
Another use would be where each department in the company could list their own job openings; then, on one central page, you could collect all of those individual openings
and display them all. In these instances, you can use a subtemplate to easily manage the differing numbers of placeholders.
Other considerations for how you lay the data out on the page, and how to organize the placement of the data within the web site, needs this kind of consideration on a
page by page basis.
You should consider these questions: Would it be best to use one placeholder on the page template, then use a subtemplate to break that placeholder up into parts? Or
would it be better to have a few more page templates to allow for different placeholder arrangements?
Another example would be an instance where you have a small piece of information that does not necessarily need a separate page, but you would definitely want to reuse.
An example of this could be stockholder contact information, or possibly job application information, separate from typical corporate contact information. The
information is not enough to necessarily warrant its own page.
In all of these cases, the page template would be the same. It would have the banner, the navigation, a footer, and then in the middle, the placeholder representing the area
that can be replaced and filled with any information you need, structured exactly as you need it. It was the consideration of how to use a subtemplate to further use a
placeholder or multiple placeholders within that template that enables you to keep the single look that you need for all pages.
It would also be possible to achieve this layout with different page templates on each page. Again, it depends on how you plan your site.
As you can see, the most important part of the site creation is to figure out how each portion of the web site, both in terms of structure and content, is displayed. With Site
Studio, the more time you invest in planning before you create, the less time you spend creating the hundreds and even thousands of pages your web site delivers.
Planning Your Web Site 4-3