By Rebecca Lima
Whether you are building a new website, switching to a new marketing agency, or just looking to understand your website better, the most fundamental element to look at is site structure. By understanding your site structure, you can simplify your onboarding process with an agency and have a deeper appreciative of how your site works.
The process of building a website is very similar to the process of building a home, so for simplicity’s sake we will use that comparison.
The first items involved in building your home include purchasing land to build on, finding out what your address will be, having the blueprints created, and lastly planning the layout of your décor. The major components involved in building a website are your hosting, domain name, FTP, and CMS.
Let’s start off by looking at your plot of land. There are a lot of different things that come to mind when choosing the perfect piece of land to build your home on. Will I be close to work? Is there enough space here for the home I want to build? Is it in a safe neighborhood? The same thing goes for hosting: hosting is the “land” on which your website resides. Hosting also has certain storage constraints and good hosting can provide extra security to your site. Most simply, hosting makes your website accessible, so when users navigate to your address they see your home or website and can come visit. Now that we have our land we need to receive our address.
Once you select your plot of land it is important to get your address. Without your address being correctly connected to your new location it would make it very difficult to navigate to your plot of land let alone find your house. Your domain name works the same way. A domain name allows people to look you up on the internet by name. Instead of “123 Elm Street,” you use “www.MyCompany.com.”
Now that we have our land and an address that allows us to navigate there let’s start building our house!
When building a house, engineers and architects create in-depth blueprints to lay out the foundation and structure of your home. Similarly, theme files are the blueprints of your site. You wouldn’t be able to make big changes like adding on a man-cave or a morning room without looking at these blueprints and it is the same for your website. Whether you are overhauling your home page or making changes to your header, having access to theme files helps developers and agencies look at the current structure of your site so they can make big changes safely.
Although blueprints might be needed for changing the structure of your home, there is a lot of customization you can do on the interior without them. However, if you are too busy or interior design isn’t your cup of tea you can always have a marketing agency make these smaller interior design changes.
When you move into a home you want it to represent your own style. You can make changes to wall colors, flooring, furniture, and more. On your website, you make these kinds of changes in your Content Management System, or CMS. Our favorite CMS is WordPress, because it offers many different plugins and customizable features. In WordPress you can make changes to the content and small changes to the look of the site but if you were to do a major renovation we would need to consult your FTP, or the blueprints of your home.
By understanding your site structure just as you understand the structure of your home, you will be able to better understand what resources agencies or developers ask for, and where to find them.
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About the Author
Rebecca Lima is an Account Executive at ChoiceLocal, specializing in search engine optimization. She is most proud of her 100% Net Promoter Score. Rebecca is in constant pursuit of obscure hobbies including everything from circus classes to volcano surfing.
