Structuring Your Website
A crucial part of good web design is structuring websites in ways that help both human visitors and search engine crawlers understand its content, and so increase visitor satisfaction as well as sales or visitor conversion rates.
When designing the framework through which a website's content is presented to users, the focus is on how to best link together all the separate sections of the site, and how to search and navigate between them easily and effectively.
Knowing what the goals are for the website will influence the way you structure it, and how you build in ease of use for its visitors.
For instance, is your website meant primarily to provide information to users, or to sell products? This requires you to think about what you want visitors to do when they arrive, and how you want them to navigate around the site.
Internet users want above all else to be able to find information easily, and quickly.
If they can't, they're less likely to spend time on a website, and even less likely to return to it.
This means that an easily searchable and navigable structure is crucial to your web design.
As a general rule, visitors should never need to click more than three times to get to the page with the information they need.
Thinking about how you'll organise sections and sub-sections of content is therefore an especially important part of website structuring.
Consider the homepage as being the first tier of content, and pages linked directly from it as those for second tier content.
You might then want to have a further set of pages, containing third tier content and linkable from the second tier pages.
If, for instance, you have a website about elephants, your homepage should make this clear and give some basic information about why elephants are so great and why your website is great, too.
It should also have links to second tier content pages - so, in this case, to pages about African elephants, Asian elephants, and perhaps also a forum for elephant enthusiasts! That is, it should encourage visitors to stay on your site, to browse further, and enable them to do so.
On the second tier pages, you can have links to third tier pages - in this case, each of the African and Asian pages might have links to articles about each type of elephant, places to visit elephants, items for sale, and image galleries for each type of elephant.
This example illustrates the importance of using distinct tiers of content in structuring your website, and of having a clear basic structure in place.
It also emphasises the crucial point that however good your content, it's just as important to make it easily accessible when you put it online.
When designing the framework through which a website's content is presented to users, the focus is on how to best link together all the separate sections of the site, and how to search and navigate between them easily and effectively.
Knowing what the goals are for the website will influence the way you structure it, and how you build in ease of use for its visitors.
For instance, is your website meant primarily to provide information to users, or to sell products? This requires you to think about what you want visitors to do when they arrive, and how you want them to navigate around the site.
Internet users want above all else to be able to find information easily, and quickly.
If they can't, they're less likely to spend time on a website, and even less likely to return to it.
This means that an easily searchable and navigable structure is crucial to your web design.
As a general rule, visitors should never need to click more than three times to get to the page with the information they need.
Thinking about how you'll organise sections and sub-sections of content is therefore an especially important part of website structuring.
Consider the homepage as being the first tier of content, and pages linked directly from it as those for second tier content.
You might then want to have a further set of pages, containing third tier content and linkable from the second tier pages.
If, for instance, you have a website about elephants, your homepage should make this clear and give some basic information about why elephants are so great and why your website is great, too.
It should also have links to second tier content pages - so, in this case, to pages about African elephants, Asian elephants, and perhaps also a forum for elephant enthusiasts! That is, it should encourage visitors to stay on your site, to browse further, and enable them to do so.
On the second tier pages, you can have links to third tier pages - in this case, each of the African and Asian pages might have links to articles about each type of elephant, places to visit elephants, items for sale, and image galleries for each type of elephant.
This example illustrates the importance of using distinct tiers of content in structuring your website, and of having a clear basic structure in place.
It also emphasises the crucial point that however good your content, it's just as important to make it easily accessible when you put it online.
