|
You should think
of a base as a connector in your configuration in site
explorer. It allows you to subdivide your site into sections
to make for more logical navigation. In the same way that we
group related files in the same folder in Windows Explorer, we
can group related web pages in the same base site in site
explorer.
Look at the
example configuration here.
We'll see a number of base sites in this configuration including
church, GAA, Business, Education & Further Education
(contained in Education). Applying this configuration makes a
lot of sense to avoid cluttering our main menu. We can drill
down to categories and sub categories within a topic without
causing confusion.
Imagine we are
setting up a community portal website. There are a number of
local organisations interested in publishing content on our site
including schools, church, soccer club, drama society, golf
club, historical society, businesses, tourism board, athletics
club etc. Straight away we can see certain synergies &
relationships between some of the organistaions so we could
group the soccer club, golf club & athletics club into a
single category - sport. This category would then branch off
into the 3 different sports. Likewise we could group historical
soceity, businesses & tourism board together into
attractions. This makes a lot of sense for larger sites as the
final site will look far more structured and less cluttered.
As a second
example, lets say we are setting up a website for a supermarket
and we want to advertise our stock. It would make sense to
subdivide the menu into relavent sections so we could put all
the food together, all the hardware together, all the drapery
together & all the household items together etc. We can then
subdivide the food section further into vegtables, meat , fruit
etc.
If you have a
website with less than 7 or 8 pages, there probably is no need
to use a base site. If it goes over this however, it may be
worth using.
|
