Creating Content for the Web in Java

Printing Code 128 Code Set A in Java Creating Content for the Web

and banking tools In fact, that financial services company may choose to categorize its content not only by the tools on the site (functions) but also by the various products it offers (concepts), which demonstrates that there s more than one way to slice content Categorizing by logical steps: Some sites dispense with the notion of concepts or functions altogether and focus on tasks that get something done Online auto sites, for example, like to walk visitors through a series of steps to find the car they re looking for, offering related content at appropriate points along the way Sorting by topics or keywords: Sites with a diverse array of content tend to offer users a couple of ways of getting at information Keywords (topics) are a common way to associate content with more than one area of interest For example, a music store may organize its site by concepts such as instruments, sheet music, and accessories, and sort the content by topics such as pianos, drums, guitars, amplifiers, and flutes, to name just a few Arranging hierarchically: This method of categorization assumes that some content elements are more important than others, which is reflected in how the content is displayed on the site Hierarchy is often used in conjunction with another categorization scheme To go back to the banking example for a moment, imagine that you ve got your portfolio online Usually, your portfolio is organized by concept or function, as well as by hierarchy The portfolio is given more prominence than the other products the bank sells, because the folks at the bank know that the content in the portfolio is more important to the user Grouping by type: As noted in the previous section, content type is the other major way to categorize content On a number of media sites, such as the ABC News site (wwwabcnewscom), you can easily find all the video content in a single location, in addition to being able to get your news by feature area

If you ve got the right tools, creating content for the Web is a breeze And because you ve got a copy of Macromedia Studio MX 2004, you ve already got a host of tools that can help you create all sorts of content for your site To recap, here is a list of some of the content you can create with the products in the Macromedia Studio suite: Fireworks MX 2004: Create quality photorealistic graphics that can be used in Dreamweaver or Macromedia Flash

Dreamweaver MX 2004: Create pages from basic HTML to complete database driven applications, as well as use the publishing tools to help you maintain your site FreeHand MX: Make illustrations that can be used to create the look and feel of your Web site or your Flash movie Macromedia Flash MX 2004: Create animations that bring your site to life ColdFusion MX 61 Developer Edition: Create dynamic, databasedriven applications Contribute 2: Have non-technical colleagues add and modify content on the site in both the development and maintenance phases of the Web site s life In addition to these tools, you ll find that other non-Macromedia software tools can be essential to generating and managing content: Microsoft Word: Word is the most common word processor in the world for a reason When you re creating text for Web sites, there s still no better tool out there than Word for quickly and easily creating text Adobe Acrobat: The Acrobat PDF format has become the downloadable document format of choice in the Web world If you re going to develop large, professionally-designed text- and image-heavy documents for the Web, then investing in the full version of Adobe Acrobat is worth the money PDF files ensure that your documents will always have the same look and feel, regardless of what browser or platform users may have Offering PDF files for download will also make your users happy because they only need to download the free Adobe Acrobat Reader to read your PDF documents Microsoft Excel: As a spreadsheet, Excel can serve two very useful purposes It can help you manage your content by providing you with a nice tool to manage your categorized data With Excel, you can also save data in CSV format, which is the most common data format for importing into a database So, for example, if you are providing your users with a list of the names and addresses of people in your association, then you might consider providing the information in CSV format, so that users can import the contact information directly into their own address book Microsoft Access (or equivalent): Access is a database If you create an e-commerce site, you ll find that your product data is best kept in a database, rather than in plain text Access is the most commonly available database (though not necessarily the most robust), and is easily compatible with ColdFusion