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Organising your pages

Category: Website-Design. Words: 840: View Archives

Lets create a list!

One of the first steps in planning your website is to create a list of all the pages that you might need. A small website might only include a few pages: i.e. home, products, contact-us and about-us. However, if you are thinking about creating a larger website you will obviously need to plan for many more pages.

Identifying your pages

To help identify your pages try spending some time thinking about your websites goals, its purpose and its target audience. It might also be a good idea to research other sites similar to yours to see how they’ve organised their information.

Don’t worry too much about the length of your list, just write down all the pages you think you might need; we will be looking at organising and structuring the pages later on. E-commerce stores or very large database websites often require a very different approach; in this article we will focus on small to medium sized websites.

To give you an example of a typical set of site pages we have listed the pages of a fictional software company.

Home page
Company Services
Company information
Support pages
Discussion Board
UK Division
Ireland Division
Scotland Division
Contact
Company Location map
Writing Software
Graphic Software
Website Software
Software updates
Extras
Software books
Book 1
Book 2
Testimonials
Copyright information
Privacy Statement
Accessibility Statement
Links
Events
Jobs
Faq

As you can see, we have managed to identify a total of 26 pages for our fictional software company, it’s now time to start thinking about arranging these pages into website sections.

Organising your pages into site sections

To help your visitors locate what they came to find we now need to arrange your pages logically into various sections and then into sub-sections. This will enable us to present a clearly defined structure that follows a logical order and is easy to use.

Home
- Jobs
Software
- Writing Software
- Graphic Software
- Website Software
- Software updates
Company
- Testimonials
- Company Services
- Events
Contact
- UK Division
- Ireland Division
- Scotland Division
- Company Location map
- Links
Software Books
- Software book 1
- Software book 2
Support
- Discussion Board
- Faq

Copyright, Privacy and Accessibility Statement we’ll put in the footer of every page.

As you can see the website structure is starting to take some shape, it is no longer just a long list of potential pages. Some pages have been combined and others organised into a logical order of primary sections and sub-sections. We can now use the website structure as the building blocks for our next task, preparing a graphical website map.

Graphical website map or site diagram

Whatever the size of your website its always a good idea to develop a graphical website map. A website map is a set of simple diagrams that describes the information architecture and the interaction of pages on your site. A website map is a valuable tool for clients and web designers alike as it helps define the sites structure in a visual context.

Fig: 0.1. Example of a very simple website map.

Apply a user-led approach

Its a good idea to initially draw up your website map with pencil and paper. When creating the map always apply a user-led approach; try to anticipate what the user wants and then layout the page structure in an easy to follow way. Use arrows or lines to show how the pages will be hyper-linked together. It’s also a good idea at this stage to give each page a title; the title must reflect the content of the particular page. This is important as titles are often read by assistive technologies like screen reading software and search engines (like Google) use them to index your site.

The website map helped to arrange, link and associate the individual pages that make up your website. We have now done enough groundwork to move on to the next phase, creating an easy to use navigation system.

Site navigation

Navigation often consists of a set of graphical buttons or interactive text links. Its important to locate the primary navigation and any other important information above the fold making sure it’s clearly displayed. See fig 0.2. As a rule of thumb, the primary links should not exceed seven. Sub navigation links are often seen just below the primary navigation or placed in the sidebar.

Fig: 0.2. Above The Fold: The section of a web page that is visible without scrolling.

It’s also essential that the navigation system is consistent and arranged in a similar layout throughout your site. A consistent navigation system will enable your visitors to find your products or services efficiently and works best when it’s clearly defined, grabs attention and attracts the users eye.

Naming your navigation links

When it comes to naming your individual sections try to trim them down to one or two words. For example imagine a set of primary navigation links like this:

Our company introduction page
company information structure
Our full selection of software products

Perhaps, the titles are a bit long; it might be better if they were written in a more concise way, i.e

Home
Company info
Products

Summary

Planning a good solid structure will enable your visitors to use your website with ease. So don’t rush this important phase of the project, take your time, think carefully and create great website content.

You can read the full article over at www.mediascape.org.uk

23/05/09 13:03 Posted by Leeroy

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