Website Documentation

[nevets2001uk]

Here's a question that I've had trouble finding much information about on the web.

What documentation does everyone create for a website?

I'm working on a website for a company I work for and obviously I need to include complete documentation for the project. I am planning to create a document for each individual page which would for example show what images are on the page and their respective sizes.

Is this a good idea and what other information and documents should I look at producing? How should these be formatted etc.

What documentation do you all carry out?

Thanks

 

[vbkris]

i usually give a link called helpdesk and create seperate html file for each functionality... i also give a context sensitive help.(F2 as F1 is IE's help file)...

Known is handfull, Unknown is worldfull

 

[ChrisHunt]

"I am planning to create a document for each individual page which would for example show what images are on the page and their respective sizes"

What would be the purpose of such a document? You could find that information easily by looking at the HTML page itself. You may be creating a lot of work for yourself to produce documents that nobody will want to look at.

Concentrate on what (and who) the documentation is FOR. Imagine you've been handed that website to maintain - what would you need to know? What would you find difficult to discover? Things like the directory structure - what goes where and why? CGI scripts - what do they do? what files do they use? Document the thinking behind the website, rather than just expressing the HTML code in different terms.

Speaking as a contract programmer, who often has to dive in to unfamiliar systems (though nor web sites), I never set much store by documentation anyway. It's so often unreliable or out-of-date that I find it better to just dive into the code and figure out what's going on for myself!

-- Chris Hunt

http://www.extracon.com

http://www.mcgonagall-online.org.uk

http://www.napitalia.org.uk

http://www.leicesteryha.org.uk

 

[nevets2001uk]

OK thanks. I really wasn't sure what should be included. From a course a did a little while ago at college we had to create mountains of paperwork for every project including a web site.

For that we had to show all sorts of stuff that seemed mostly pointless. I see what you mean about not just showing the same information that already within the code.

Basically the business wants some protection for if I left as no-one else here codes websites at all. I've commented all my ASP.NET code so that should be OK.

Is a site map the only other real piece of paperwork that I will need then? Are there any other docs that anyone creates regularily for websites?