Strategic Planning

Big words used in business to describe a process of defining what your goals are and working back through the processes that will allow you to achieve your goals.

This is how I taught myself what I hope you will learn from this. I had a basic web page and I wanted to learn how to create it using some HTML templates, so that I could then create any number of similar pages using those same templates.

I didn't want to rewrite the HTML on the templates for every page. Although that is easy to do using copy/paste or file/save_as, it is not good for site maintenance because then every page has to be changed when changes are made.

Have a look at the page I wanted (rough draft).

Because Best Western are likely to change their corporate image and hence page layout at any time, I need to be able to change all that easily without changing the content on the site.

There are four clearly defined regions on the page:

• The navigation bar
• The page header
• The page content
• The page footer

Having written the page I then literally cut it into four pieces:

• nav.inc
• header.inc
• index.php
• footer.inc

The .inc files are simply text files with the HTML on them.

The .php file is simply the content of the page with a tiny bit of PHP code (easily learnt) at the top and bottom:

And that's all there is to it!

So let's do it together: continue!