When you spend 10 years and author over 100,000 web pages you begin to notice a few things "out there on the web" and how they apply to the structure of sites authored. Here we examone the makeup of various things - this will give you a background in the way we see things which should give you an appreciation for the tools we've developed.

There are certain principles we adhere to throughout.

The first is the idea of a hierarchy, or ontology. This is nothiong more than how you organize what you want to put up on the web. If you have one page of text that's the extreme case and involves no thinking. Buf if you have a few dozen? Or hundreds? Or thousands?

You're going to need some system or organization, that is to say the procedures and issues governing the creation of a 4 page website and wholly different from those of a 15,000 page website.

There are two findamental principles that are adhered to throughout. While the system does not at all contrain itself to these, if you work with them instead of against them suddenly everything falls into place and is simple, despite the complexity of the overall project.

Here are those two principles:

• Some pages have content, others are index pages that point to content.

• People can handle at most, six points at a time.

Additionally, the conclusion was reached that there should be an organic mapping of the way information is laid out in the directory structure of the webserver, and web addresses. This forces an organizational hierachy and provides infinifly scalable websites yet keeps each "piece" very simple. This makes it very easy to decide "where stuff goes" when you're adding content but also makes it easy to navigate as information naturally "clusters" together. The system provides, automatically, hyperlinks to related information and indexes of things one "level" both up and down. For an average website this means from any page, you're at most two clicks away from any other page. And that you can never get "lost" - there are no dead ends. However you got to a particular page doesn't matter, from there you can get anywhere.

It doesn't matter what computer you use - a PC running Windows, or a Mac, or a Linux or Sun Solaris machine - in every case your Operating System lets you manage "files" and "folders" (or "directories" - same thing).

All the concepts below inter-relate. Once you understand how each one works with the others you'll grasp the overall method.