Website Design
Design Considerations
Theme/Content
Website Structure
Page Layout
Aesthetics
Content vs Style
Maintainability
Tech Requirement
Future Scalability
Website Security
Browser Support
Graceful Degradation
Accessibility
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Webpage Coding

Website Design Considerations

Maintainability - Sharing Resources

Using a regular template is an ideal way to ensure that all of your pages have the same look and feel. However a scalability issue soon arises if all of the code is actually written within each page file, simple changes will necessitate editing every single page file.

Once these get beyond half a dozen or so then the task starts to become very complex and time consuming.

There are several key features of a web-server that can be used to avoid this and to take the site to a new level of maintainability; sharing files, data or other resources.

The server can be configured to allow Server-Side Includes (SSI) When the page is served the server scans it for the SSI directive. This is an instruction to locate a particular file and stream it into the output as if it were part of the original page.

Regularly repeated parts of the page such as the header, footer and side-bars can be written as separate files and referenced from each of the webpages as SSIs. Future changes will require no more than a single edit to the relevant SSI file.

The <head> section of the page also allows external CSS and JavaScript (JS) files to be included within the page, the same principle applies here too, these resources only need to be coded once as separate files and then included via the page <head> for each page. Changes to any of these resources will be global with the minimum of editing.

This method has many advantages, simplicity, global effects, clean HTML, reduced complexity, ease of maintenance and more, but with no discernible drawbacks.

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