Template Considerations

What should you consider when building a template?

If you are not familiar with the system and don't understand the paramaters of the programs it can get hectic trying to grasp the space needed by each of the programs. In most cases, there are minimum requirements but the tables can expand ito larger areas.

Knowing that, you can build tables limiting the program to is required space, or you can allow it to expand into the users full page.

One of our most popular features is the shopping cart browse and search feature. Since most of our custmers are selling products you should plan around these hevily used programs.

If the page has a side menu, you must leave a minimum of 600 pixels for the main list or the thumbnail gallery. The search will expand to the full page, so if you want it to occuly less space you will need a table aroud the area for the main content.

These limits can be imposed in each of the pages. With the customer based inclusion codes allowing them to move programs to any page, you could just as easily build a 600 pixel table in and single page using the shopping cart then allowing broader parameters site wide for unique features in all the pages.

It really comes down to what the user will be doing with the website and how much they will be editing pages. If you do all your work in the custom template, then you have little chance of the website owner editing away your work.

Menu Paramaters

There are different types of menus. All of the menus default to text links and can be replaced by the website owner with actual images.

The menu buttons or text can be sperated by spaces, paragraph tags or line breaks. If you have traditional buttons with spaces in between them, the paragraph spacing is fine. But if you are stacking images in a continuous line to make up one image then line breaks should be used.

If you use the menu accross the top ot bottom the spacing is just single spaces so the images will wrap over multiple lines if the website owner keeps adding buttons. You should allow enough space in the event additional pages are needed on the main menu. Poor planning could result in a meny that takes the entire design out of wack.

Title Space

There are no paramaters on the title space that can be uploaded or modified by the site owner. We expect the developer to keep that in check and use images of reasonable sizes to work for the page. But it is not unreasonable to see full title images 800 pixels accross and even as tall as 200 pixels. Although it is bordering on too big for download and is jepordized by systems like AOL and Netzero download accellerators that compress thell out of those bandwidth hogs, if that is where you want to go, the system supports it.

Keep in mind, just because you know to upload an image 200x600 pixels does not mean the site owner will. They could overload an 1024x800 image in its place. Therefore it is important to consider that you should define the image sizes in the html and not leave it up to the images to define spacing.

If your title space is part of a sliced image table, uploading an alternate image of a different size will make a big mess out of your hard work.

Name Changes and Image Paths

Many website owners use multiple names for the same site or often change the url of their website for any number of reasons. For example if the have mybusinessname.net and the .com becomes availale, they may want to change and let the .net nam expire.

If you have linked all the images to the actual url, then when the name expires or changes the website template will need to be changed. If you use local paths then the template works regardless of name changes or website name resoulution.

Testing When Done

It is critical that you fully test templates when you have finished them. You should test them on the main browsers and operating systems and with all the programs the site is using.

If you make a coding mistake, leave an open search form or even a single open tag, you can create serious problems. In the instance of an open form tag set, you can cause a program like the shopping cart to post to a search program or other program on some browsers. You can create situations were links disapear or link locally rather than to external websites.

The biggest problem is open forms the secons biggest problem is javascript which causes errors or intereferes with existing scripts on pages or programs. You can't just check the home page and assume it all works. As the designer you will ultimately be blammed for any errors or loss of e-commerce functionality you have inadvertently designed into the pages.

Redirects

Each website has a 404 redirect to the home page or primary domain. We do this because as pages are removed the website owner does not want to lose search traffic. Rather than telling a potential client that the page is not found we send them to the main page which is the primary source of information on any website.

If your links are incorrect becuase of spelling errors or incomplete urls they will send people to the home page since the actual url is not found. These errors should be recognized and repaired before the template is completed.

When linking to relative paths you should keep in mind that all programs do not run from the same directory. Between the 404 redirects and a local link it is possible to get someone in a location where none of the links work. You should always use complete paths or the actual urls for linking.