Site Refactoring

The process of creating a structure for this site is a real-world case study for dealing with moved pages, dead links, categorizing content, and more.

When I created this site, I really didn’t have any concrete plans for it. I had some photos to share with family and friends. I posted the notes and assignments for a class I taught. What I had was content that put up in a haphazard fashion with no real structure.

The process of creating a structure for this site is a real-world case study for dealing with moved pages, dead links, categorizing content, and more.

Card sorting

How do you determine where pages go in a Web site? My site, like most personal Web sites, has rather diverse content. There’s some photos from trips and parties, a martini recipe, a weblog, some longer writings, and a couple of applications that I have written.

Unfortunately, the manner in which this site grew meant that the early content that I had created was usually just stuck in random places. The newer content was placed in a hastily organized structure that wasn’t very flexible.

What I needed was a way to categorize everything and create a site structure that could be extended to support future growth of the site. To determine a structure, I used a technique called card sorting. I cut out slips of paper for every item on my site and went through them, placing similar items in piles. I did this several times until I had all of the content organized into a few categories.

For an in-depth look at card sorting, you can read articles in Intranet Journal or developerWorks.

Moved Pages

Once my card sorting exercise was complete, I had a logical structure for the site that should be able to support the addition of new stuff without the need of a complete reorganization. But to place all of my existing content into the new structure meant moving files.

In the past, when I placed something on this site, it stayed where it was. When things get moved around, it makes life difficult on people. Owners of other sites that have linked to me now have dead links. People with bookmarks have bookmarks to missing pages. It’s a bad deal all around. So I never moved anything.

But now I had a solid reason for moving my files around. Placing everything into the new structure would make it easier to manage in the future. I made the decision to move everything into the new structure, but also decided to minimize the problems created by doing so. I modified the page that comes up when you request a file that is not found to check if the page that was requested had moved. If so, the user is automatically redirected to the new location without any interruption. So now people won’t suddenly have broken links and bookmarks just because I decided to rearrange things around here.

If you would like to do the same thing to your site, you’ll need a little knowledge of regular expressions and the bit of JavaScript code found below. You can learn more about regular expressions in JavaScript from Webreference.

<script language="JavaScript">
<!--

var url = location.href

var reg

// Redirect requests for the old Yosemite URL to the new one

reg = /\/yosemite(.*)/i

if (reg.test(url)) 

	location.replace("/photos/yosemite/")

// Redirect requests for all pages in /foo/ to the new

// location in /articles/foo/

reg = /\/foo/(.*)/i

if (reg.test(url)) 

	location.replace("/articles/foo/" + RegExp.$1)

// Keep adding your own.

//-->

</script>

Refactoring

Over at Elegant Hack, Christina had the clever idea of applying the software engineering concept of refactoring to Web site maintenance and improvement. Refactoring is the process of making small changes to a program that improve the overall execution without introducing new features (and hopefully no new bugs). The basic idea is to leave things better than you found them.

Over the last few days, I’ve been engaging in the refactoring of this web site. I took 20 minutes to clean up some of my CSS. I spent an hour standardizing the TITLE tags on all my pages.

With a little planning and some work, I have created a solid structure for my site that shoals support anything I would like to add in the future. A flexible architecture is key to growing while avoiding having to reorganize things again later.

Every day, I can pick something off my to-do list and spend a few minutes cleaning things up. By doing it this way, I don’t have to wait until I can spend a large block of time making changes all at once.