Web site structure

Planning the structure of your Web site is one of the most critical stages of site design. It determines how your site will look to humans and to search engines.
There are several meanings of Web site structure. The most important one is the navigational structure: the way in which the visitor or search engine gets to your site and navigates through it. The second most important is the conceptual, logical structure, which the way that you and the visitors ordinarily think about the site.  In theory, the navigational structural design is a hierarchy, and so you will see a chart like the one below in many Web design manuals.

Web site Hierarchical Structure
 In this simplified concept, the visitor arrives at the home page, clicks on one of a limited number of second tier links and gets to the third tier pages and usually their sub pages in a fourth tier where all the action is at. It takes three clicks to get from main page to Teleporters to Quantum Teleporters. Pages at each level link to each other, and they also link to their “portal page” in the tier above them. This aspect of the design accomplishes two main goals. The first is to ensure that the main page is not excessively cluttered, and the second is to ensure that the visitor will not need to click more than three links to get to any page in the Web site.While many Web sites have menu structures that look as though they follow the above design, and the above structure is a part of Web site design, no real Web site should have only the above navigation structure. For one thing, you will immediately notice that under hyperdrives there might be different models, and further specification pages “forbidden” four-click navigation model. Some of the product pages might also link to white papers or news pages about the products, and vice -versa, the news pages.

The “main page” of a Web site used to be the standard entry point for all Web sites, back when Web sites all had black text on a battleship gray background. Search engines changed all that. A surfer looking for interstellar hyperdrives arrives directly at the hyperdrive page, but then he or she wants to see who is behind the company and what their quality policy is. Nobody wants to do business with hucksters from Arcturus who sell second rate goods. If the visitor has to click all the way up and down the hierarchy to get to the information they need in the about page, or to contact the site owners, they may give up and leave the Web site. Therefore, there are many navigational shortcuts through the hierarchy.

Another constraint is that the relative ranking of a Web page in search engines like Google depends on the number of links to that page, including the internal same-site links. If you have an e-commerce site that sells thousands of items of different types, you may want to have a link to pages that sell the really popular items, such as the latest rock group or hit movie DVD or smash hit Best Selling book (Son of Harry Potter Returns?) from every page in your site.

In addition to the above neat design, the Web site must have the following:
 Site Map - The Site Map is a separate page that is used by visitors and search engine spiders to find all the pages in a Web site. It is usually linked from every page of the Web site, and, in small sites, it has a link to every single page in the Web site, regardless of hierarchy, using the full path to that page (for example, “http://www.mywidgets.com/products/hyperdrives/interstellar.htm”). If the site is large (over about 300 pages) then lower tier pages can be put on secondary site map pages. The site map is important not just for visitors. Search engine spiders, the robot programs that add your Web pages to the search engines, use site maps to navigate quickly through the site and get to all your pages.
 

Repeating links on every page - A number of Web site pages or facilities must be accessible from every page of the site. These include: The main page, the site map, the contact page and some other pages that you want to push in the search engine. Pages like the home page and the site map must always be linked using a full path absolute link, and the link text (”Anchor Text”) should include the keywords of the main page, not just “home.” Search engines use that link text to rank your main page. If you are selling shoes, the link text should say “Shoes.” Unless your Web site is called “Home,” it is not a good idea to link to the main page with the text “home.” A shopping site needs to have a shopping cart link on every page as well of course.

The following additional links and features are optional, but are highly recommended:

Featured pages - As noted, you may need to promote a particular item on every page of your site, or a group of pages. Often the item or items to be promoted will change, so it is good to have a dynamic system that can generate these links quickly.

Personalized Content - You may want to show visitors content that is especially relevant to them, based on their previous shopping, geographic location or customization specifications.
Search - The search is not important for search engines, but it can be very important for visitors. It ensures that every page in the site is only two clicks away, and it makes it easy for them to find the information they need.

Hierarchical Navigator - This is a graphic portrayal of where the visitor is in the site, for example:
 Shoes >> Ladies Shoes >> High heeled shoes >> Designer shoes
The visitor can click on any of the upper level links to get to that portal page.

Directory organization - The other aspect of Web site structure is the organization of files in directories. There is usually no reason why this has to follow the hierarchical structure of the Web site, though the two types of organizations often coincide. The site should be organized for technical convenience. Very large directories may not be handled well by FTP clients or Web page design software, so you will want to group content. Humans need to work with organized groups of material too. You do not want to go searching through thousands of files to find the one you want to edit. In addition, content that has to be renewed together should stay together, so that you can upload an entire directory using FTP if you have static pages. Another important consideration is that some parts of the Web site, such as applications based on CGI or PHP, or financial transactions areas, require special treatment and protection in the .htaccess or robots.txt files, and it is convenient to group these pages together.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 7th, 2008 at 5:35 am and is filed under Design & Layout, Featured Article. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.