Building a Website: Getting Started
I build a lot of websites. To date, I've launched dozens of sites: some, microsites of only a few pages; others, massive dynamic sites with content that would span several reams of paper. While the projects always differ in size, style, and project goal, they mostly start the same way. With each new project I begin the same process; create a folder to house the files, subfolders for things like images and javascript files, add some basic style sheets to control font face and sizes, etc., etc. With every new project I found myself cutting and pasting code from other sites I built previously to get me started. Being a junkie for organization, I decided to take this cut and pasted code and create a very basic set of files to use as a starting point when building a website. It works reasonably well for me so I'm sharing it with you.
This includes some basic CSS files for screen and print and a default html with things like a link to skip navigation and a notice to outdated browsers. Note that my files use the .aspx extension since I usually code with .net but you can easily rename them. I recommend using .aspx, .php, .cfm, or some other server-side extension instead of just plain old .htm. Even if you don't have any fancy scripting or databases on your site, you may be asked to add it in the future and having the extensions in place makes it a lot easier.
This is a work in progress so feedback is encouraged. If anyone has any suggestions or additions, leave them in the comments below.
Download the Site Template Zip File
UPDATE - 4/19/06: a colleague of mine noticed an extraneous </td> tag in the upgrade.aspx file (Thanks Jeff). I don't know how that got in there but the zip file has been updated to fix it
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