The creation and maintenance of a website is made easier through automation. The user selects the data (or documents) to put on the web. Information associated with the documents is extracted from the documents and analyzed to determine the contents of the documents. A template is then automatically selected from a library of templates, and this template is used to generate the website. Both the structure and the layout of the data may be determined from the data itself, from user actions, from corporate identity templates, and from authorities that can help improve the website design.