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Planning for the future

If you can be certain of one thing it is that you will have to cope with change. You are probably aware that the number of Web users is growing very rapidly, and this, coupled with falling telecommunications costs, means you may be faced with extremely rapid expansion of incoming Web traffic. The Web itself is developing very swiftly and as new features become available the chances are you will want to use them, which will probably require extra capacity.

Think very carefully about how your information should be structured and try to stay with that structure. Organize the information logically to allow it to expand without the need for too much reorganization. For example, if your departmental server may later become the server for the whole organization, it may be best to impose a hierarchical structure from the start, placing your department's information within the wider organizational hierarchy. If your information is useful to others, they will create links that point to your documents and if you subsequently rename all your documents, these links will become invalid. Remember that once you have published something, others will have a stake in it. If you must delete or move a document then at least leave in its place a document with the same name saying that the original has been deleted or moved, and include a link to the new location in the latter case.

Consider how essential the Web might become to your organization, and to what extent you will come to rely on it. This may be impossible to predict, but if it does become very important you may need to have a hot standby machine in place, which precisely mirrors the information on the primary system, so that should a fault occur you can switch over immediately to the standby.

Spinning the Web by Andrew Ford
© 1995 International Thomson Publishing
© 2002 Andrew Ford and Ford & Mason Ltd
Note: this HTML document was generated in December 1994 directly from the LaTeX source files using LaTeX2HTML. It was formatted into our standard page layout using the Template Toolkit. The document is mainly of historical interest as obviously many of the sites mentioned have long since disappeared.