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Libraries are made up of collections. The only commonly used functionality associated with a library is:

• managing users

• managing your Raconteur licence

Typically a collection represents the content of your website. When you need to do something that is applicable to the entire website, this is where you go to do it. For example:

• adding or updating themes

• setting properties of the website

• updating the live website

• restoring backups

The storybook is a subdivision of the content in the collection. In large websites you can have a lot of these but most websites will only have one or two.

The most important functionality of a storybook is:

• defining where the available themes are to be used

• backing up content

• setting some simple properties that apply to all content in the storybook

• the ‘build’ and ‘preview’ functions are associated with the storybook

This is a bit of an advanced subject, but a storybook is there so you can organise your content when you have a lot of content or different kinds of content. The large websites I’ve mentioned all have several storybooks, usually to either organise their content by stage of development (some storybooks are more ‘ready’ than others), or by some category or audience that exists in their world (e.g. youth, teachers, parents).

Stories provide an important organisation of your website’s content. Unless you are building a website with a single design, not necessarily a small website, you will have more than one story.

There are three major criteria for deciding on story structure:

• appearance

• navigation of the website

• organisation of your website’s content

The content contained within a story will have a single (design) theme, and so will have a consistent appearance on the website when published. This is not to say that different stories must, or even should, look different, the normal case is for most if not all stories to look the same. And so, while this is an important consideration or possibility, it is not usually why stories are created.

The design of your website will very often use stories to influence the website navigation. You’ve seen websites where there are links at the very top of the page or the very bottom that point to pages like ‘home’, ‘contact’, ‘about’, ‘privacy policy’, and pages like those. A very common practice among Raconteur users is to have stories that correspond to this very top level of navigation. In this case, there will be a story with contact information, another with information about the site, another describing the site’s policy on privacy, and another with the primary content of the site.

There are alternative organisations for the purposes of navigation. For example, you could put this top level of navigation into storybooks. It is also possible to put the entire site into one story. This is probably the second most common way of doing things, and the way that almost all projects start off.

The general story structure will be a decision you will, in practice, make early in the life of your website. Since navigation is affected, your web designer really has to know how this is going to go, at least to start. However, Raconteur is designed to grow your site, and so the content of your site can be easily reorganised when you change your mind or when your site out-grows the initial organisation.