It’s only been about a week, but in that short time I’ve had to change the core structure several times. I think, though, that I finally have my toys arranged in a tidy, predictable, and flexible system. This means I can now return to integrating the last major content block before I launch the site: the CaveTV Videos.
But what did I change? And how will those changes support future needs as well as current? Let’s talk about that.
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For a while, I was mixing two very different issues, organizing my content files into folders based on where they appeared in the navigation. For example, since live products are organized into Showrooms, and then within brand/series collections, my book product file for Squeak! was being stored in the showrooms/books/solos/products/ folder, because it is a solo title. (Not part of a series.)
This seems fine for now, but it also means that the URL for the page would use that same folder path. What happens if one day I want to release a sequel to Squeak!? I would naturally want to move both books into a series folder, but doing that would break any links people might have saved to the original page.
Worse, the Comment System on the site is associated with specific page URLs, so changing the URL of the book page would cause all of the previous conversations on that page to suddenly vanish.
In rethinking my structure, I decided that each page in the system - projects, brands, showrooms, and products - needed to be kept in independent folders. How those pages are organized in the site navigation can now be changed arbitrarily without compromising the URL of the actual file. No matter how you reach it, the Squeak! book is a product page and it will always be a product page, located in the product folder.
So I’m now free to show visitors my products any way I like. I could have a Products page listing everything I’ve made, or a For Kids page listing my books and videos specifically for children, or I could even hide each product deep in the bowels of a labyrinthine menu of loops and dead ends. But in every case, the actual book page would still be in the same place, with the same URL. (This is probably an obvious design feature for anyone who builds websites for a living, but it required a distinct learning process to get me there.)
The other thing I had to change was my assumption about how brands, showrooms, and products are displayed. Originally I thought that each brand “shelf” in a showroom would show every product available in the brand, but when I started looking at CaveTV, I realized that plan wouldn’t work. It’s fine to show 2 or 3 or 4 books on a shelf, but there are 150 Ogg videos currently on YouTube, and 200 more waiting to be produced. I can’t let one brand dominate a showroom like that.
So I changed the logic. Showrooms now show a limit of 4 products on each brand shelf. That’s enough to showcase each collection without letting any one shelf steal the show. If you want to see the whole brand lineup, that’s what the brand index pages are for, which are now linked from the showroom for easy access.
So that’s how things stand today. The next test will be implementing the full CaveTV archive. If the new design can absorb that, then I’ll be confident it can handle anything I’m likely to throw at it for a good long while.