The architecture of a web site refers to the set of organizing principles that are systematically applied to create consistency and cohesion across the components of a web site, as well as the technological framework that supports this organization.
Project work for this course will be graded partly on the statement of architectural principles in the project documentation as well as the implementation of those principles.
Navigation architecture is the set of techniques and technologies that permit users to browse through a web site, focusing on three fundamental concerns.
Two elements form the lowest common denominator of web navigation.
Hand-constructed websites are often limited to basic navigation.
Principle: all other navigation methods must respect the use of these basic navigation methods. Basic navigation is ubiquitous and familiar. Users rely on these basic facilities and become confused by facilities that interact strangely with the basic mechanisms.
Beyond basic navigation, there are many useful additional forms of navigation that may be added to websites under software control. Three types of software system may be used.
Four common types of navigation pages are often used for top-level navigation.
It is common and useful for sites to provide either horizontal or vertical navigation bars, either on the main pages of the site or throughout the site.
HTML Frames can be used for navigation bars, but are difficult to do well. Dynamic or statically generated navigation facilities are generally more flexible.
A common form of navigation for on-line documentation or slide presentation is to use next/previous buttons to link individual sections of a document or slides of a presentation.
Given documents following a tree-structured hierarchy, next/previous navigation buttons add leaf-to-leaf links to traverse a document structure sequentially.
Links to external resources should be handled in a systematic way.
There is no predefined right way to architect the navigation facilities of a web site. The most important principle is to use systematic facilities that provide consistency throughout the website and maintainability over time.
Presentation architecture refers to the use of fonts, colors and layout for documentation and data presentation.
The use of stylesheet technologies (CSS, XSL) is critical to the separation of content and presentation.
Site-wide style sheets should be used for site-wide consistency of presentation.
An important part of many web information systems are facilities that interact with datasets of various kinds. The way in which this is organized may be referred to as the data architecture of the system.
A very common approach to a systematic data architecture is the so-called three-tier architecture.
Data presentation architecture refers to the ways in which the application may be structured to systematically present data views to the user.
There are many possibilities to consider when designing data presentation architecture.
Interaction architecture refers to the systematic techniques and technologies that are used for applications that must respond to user input.