Structuring Your Site Content Effectively
By David Pook
THE PROBLEM
Many websites are a mess, you know this already. How many times have you gone to a site knowing that somewhere on there is the information you require, but as hard as you try you cannot find it! The result normally is at best a customer frustrated with your site or more likely, no customer at all!
A bit of planning and organisation will help the visitor experience no end. This should be done at the initial stage of building a site if possible, planning a website is more than getting a fancy graphic design. These same steps can be taken as part of a site review to fix a site that doesn’t work but as is always the case with computer based systems; the later a problem is fixed, the more it will cost to do so!
SITE STRUCTURE
The first issue that needs to be addressed is the site structure. A typical site should have a number of main categories of pages which form the top navigation items and a number of auxiliary pages such as a sitemap and T&C page.
Limit the main categories. Four to seven are good numbers to keep within. If you have more than seven, your site will be unwieldy for the user to navigate.
Name them well. Make them obvious, for example if you have a weekly bulletin sent from head office to be read by all staff, don’t call it the ‘HOB List’ just because that’s what admin staff in head office call it, call it ‘Weekly Bulletins’. It is too easy to use nomenclature that may be known to you but not your target audience, never assume ‘but everybody knows that’.
Limit page length. A visitor will not scroll through thousands of words to find what they are after, consider splitting the page, maybe another level of navigation is required? It is also worth noting that Google supposedly likes pages of around 300 words.
RELEVANCY
Of course it is too easy to clutter a site with content that never gets read or used so there are a few things to consider:
- Is this page likely to have value to a visitor, if not why is it here?
- How would the visitor classify this page, is this the best place for it to be?
- Does this page get read? Use statistics. If it doesn’t get read is it redundant, or is it just in the wrong place?
NAVIGATION
Users tend to fall into one of two camps when it comes to locating information, those that search and those that navigate. They need to be treated differently and both need to have careful attention paid to them. The navigator will drill down through the site using the navigation to land on their target information, whereas a searcher will tend to go straight for that search box and expect to see the results contain what they want.
Choose your navigation system carefully. A site with no consistent navigation will lose visitors quickly as they cannot find what to do next.
Be careful when splitting navigation Splitting elements of the navigation can work well if done with care, but often it leaves the visitor in the dark. Splitting the top level from the next levels is OK if the top level navigation is part of the header and the subsequent levels are together in a left or right-hand column and clearly identifiable as such.
Avoid ’slick’ navigation A drop down navigation may look great but if a visitor finds they have to trace a precise path with the mouse in order to keep the menu open, they will find an alternative site that is easier to use very quickly. Thankfully drop down navigation is going out of fashion, mainly for this reason, but there are plenty of new contenders to take their place! Another reason to avoid this style of navigation is that it tends to rely on javascript and intricate techniques that can fail on older browsers or platforms that haven’t been considered, and remember Google, if it can’t use your navigation you will only have a few pages indexed!
You should always include a search mechanism. Search systems should be easy to use and rank relevancy well. Google provides a neat customisable and free way to integrate searches into your site, so there is no excuse for not having one!
Use a breadcrumb trail They tell you where you are within a site at a single glance. It’s easy to know where you are when you can see “Home > Products > MP3 players” right above the title. If a visitor has arrived at a page from a search, especially an external one, it can be crucial!
THE RESULT?
The result should be a much more pleasant experience for the user. They should be happier, they will have located the information they came for without hassle and may stick around to browse for longer with increased repeat visits. This should result in more business your way which after all should be the main purpose of your site!
David Pook is a web developer with a speciality in large content managed sites. He has worked on both public facing and intranet sites in the public and commercial sectors including sites with over 50,000 fully managed pages.
He has recently formed Sqoo Media where he has developed a flexible and easy to use content management system with the aim of taking his experience to smaller organisations to free them from the prison that is static content.
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