Planning
It is tempting to jump right into Dreamweaver and get working but with a little planning the experience will be a lot less frustrating and much more productive.

There is a basic workflow when building a web site that may want to consider using. The following workflow is just a suggestion so feel free to modify it to meet your own needs.

1. Planning
   What is your objective? Who is your audience? Where is the content coming from? Why are you doing it? What are the technical specifications? What is it going to look like? How are visitors going to navigate? These questions and more need to be answered before any other work is done. These answer are going to guide you through the rest of the process. I have provided a few work sheets to help in this part of the process.
2. Gathering
   This is the stage when you are collecting and organizing all the content, including text, images, logos, contact info, assignments, calendars, student work,….etc. Taking the time to get as much of your content in a binder on your desk or folder on your desktop will speed up the building process. Doing a good job here will help prevent a stalled project while you wait for someone else to get you files.
3. Building
   Here is where we get down to work creating your web site. Most likely the greatest portion of the time spent on the project will be during this phase. You need to decide if you are going to be hand coding you web pages using HTML or using a web editor such as Dreamweaver, Netscape Composer, or Font Page to build your pages.
4. Transferring
   This is the easiest part web site creation, making all your hard work available for the world to see. The most common method of transferring your site to a Web server (host) is using FTP.
5. Updating
   You will want to keep your site current and fresh especially if you have dated material such as a calendar. If people see that your site has not changed since 1998 most likely they will not be returning.

Let’s focus on the first step in the workflow, Planning. When starting a new web site you first step should be to grab some paper and a pencil and plan. If you plan out your web site first you will save yourself time and frustration. Planning first will help you to avoid being overwhelmed by your project. Becoming overwhelmed by a project will happen before you know it unless you are following a plan. The following are suggestions to help you through the planning process of your web site.

1. Decide the purpose of your web site. (See the Planning Questionnaire)
2. Decide on a site structure (Diagram the Navigation/Links)
3. Decide on a folder structure (Organize your root folder))
4. Create a page design (Look and Feel)