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● Introduction & Index ● What is PR ● Job Expectations ● Types of Media ● Building Relationships ● Media, Hams & FCC Rules ● The Basic News Release ● Interviews and Live ● Making your own show ● Easy P.R. ● Public Service Events ● Piggy-back to Events ● Pictures NOW! ● P.R. Research Aids ● Making Friends ● ARES® PIO ● Final Exam Information |
A place to park it Okay, you’ve bought your site domain name and have contracted with a hosting company. Essentially you now hold a blank piece of paper and have the ability to put something on it and show it to the world. What will be the function of the site? In my case, I wanted to make a showcase for both my work as a photojournalist and show off a bit of my skill with an animation program called Flash. Diagram it Once the purpose of the site is defined, I sit down with a piece of paper and consider what I want on my front page and all the pages underneath. I make a flowchart starting with index.html (the standard name for the home page) and work my way down the line. This helps me decide what pages need to be linked to all the other pages. You don’t want to build any dead ends into your site. Always give the ability to return to the home page at the very least. In my case, I built a Flash animation to place on the opening or index.html page and added pages to hold each year’s favorite pictures, a page for bigger photo projects and multimedia as well as pages for contact, favorite links and resume information. Navigation should be clean, easy to locate, intuitive and consistent. Keep as few links as possible between the front page and the meat of the site. I hate sites that open with “Click to Enter” Obviously I wanted to enter your site or I wouldn’t be here. Don’t punish me with extraneous mouse clicks. To facilitate that consistent ease of navigation between pages, some web site design programs will let you build a navbar, short for navigational bar. Just about every site has a navigational bar in one form or another. They run across the top or down the side or along the bottom. The beauty of a pre-built navbar is that it all the main page links are held together in one little nugget that I can drop on to every page of the site. It keeps those links consistent in size, spacing and placement. Done correctly, it will appear that the navbar is a constant item that never changes from page to page. A navbar sure beats making the same links over and over for each new page, trying to line them all up and space them the same way. Once you start diagraming your site with a flowchart, you’ll quickly realize how important the planning process is. There’s nothing I hate more than to be halfway into building a site and realize I’ve left out an important piece. |