About two years ago I realized my primary site was going to get big. By now, it’s 119 mb, plus 1.25 gb of pdf files. 87 pages so far. 3 Master pages. Site map and Google Search. RSS from Feedburner and RSS options for the major readers. And so on. Sort of an organic growth and assemblage of stuff.
I asked a lot of questions from folks here in the forum and received tons of excellent advise. So I thought of returning the favor and relating what I’ve done to manage a large and growing site.
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PDF files are kept in folders separate from the Freeway site folder on the server. Each is a relative link. I don’t use the PDF action as I knew that I would eventually have a ton of PDF files, plus some Doc files too. I also have hotlink protection activated to prevent people from linking directly to a PDF and stealing bandwidth. One month I lost 5 Gb of bandwidth to a forum in Europe.
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Master pages are kept to a minimum. One is for the single page gateway, one for all pages containing the same table format (which are the bulk of the pages) and one for a special blog feed that I just set up. Love that iFrame action. If I find that I need a very special page setup, I’ll create a new Master only if the current Master pages can’t address the design. I’ve found that too many Master pages seems to slow the load time, perhaps due to all the extra CSS?
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Navigation is kept as simple and direct as possible. This improves the user experience and makes my job a whole lot easier when it comes to adding or modifying material. I once tried an index page and that was too much work. Same for nested menus. Too much work. In the end, I opted for a top horizontal menu of important internal site links and a right hand html box for external links, RSS feeds and the like. Again, this setup made my life much easier. And from watching traffic stats, people seem to find this layout easy to navigate.
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Keep CSS to a minimum and periodically clean up your CSS. It’s all too easy to play around with settings and create all kinds of orphan CSS settings. Evaluate what you have and pare it down to the basics. I do this a few times a year and definitely after a major site update.
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Sections such as ecommerce are or will be split off into separate entities. Although I really don’t like Frames, I’ll be using Frames for a few sections that present material from other sites. Maybe.
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Hi Res images are presented as text links to the image. This greatly reduces load times. I may provide a low res thumbnail or full size image for those people on dialups or just to speed up page load time. For some really Hi Res images, I create a PDF with the image and totally separate it from the primary site.
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Site reloading is always a problem. I try to get around that by keeping links or material that will be static and that relates only to that particular page in the main body of the page, and material that relates to the Master Page in a separate graphic or html box. When I add new material to a given page but don’t change anything in the Master page, only that one page is re-uploaded. Only when I change something in the Master page does it force a massive republish and total site upload. So I do that sparingly. If this makes sense?
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Periodically check your resources. Resample and update images. Review Resources to see if there are problems that may interfere with things later on.
There are most likely other things, but I can’t think of them at the moment. A lot of this stuff is the result of discussions in the forum, pouring over the KnowledgeBase and making tons of mistakes.
Take care
Gary
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