Your Online Presence > Managing Content

Getting a Website - Organising the Information on your Site

By Lasa Information Systems Team

Before jumping into designing and building your site think carefully about how information will be organised, and how your users will find it.

When we read a book, we go by certain conventions. Each page has a number, often printed at the bottom. Pages may well be organised in chapters. If so, there will be a contents page at the front of the book where all the chapters are listed, together with the page numbers where they start. At the back of the book there may be an index. Many of us learned these conventions long ago – we hardly need to think about them. And we can see at once approximately where we are in a book – if we are half way through it, or have only a few pages left.

There are very few such obvious clues and conventions to help users find their way around a website. Indeed, a web page can include a link to any page out of billions in existence. The ability to move easily between different pages and sites can be very useful, but it can also be very confusing. You therefore need to do everything you can to structure the information on your site so that users can "navigate" – find their way – around the site easily. If you are working with a website developer, you should still think about these issues for yourself, and then talk through the relevant points with the developer.

The key issues to bear in mind when you organise your site are:

• what is the purpose of the site?
• who is the audience for the site?

Structure the information on your site into a hierarchy

Start by dividing the information into a few wide areas, and then divide it further within these if needs be. One way of doing this is to write the title of each part of your site, or individual page, on index cards. Lay these out on a big table and ask different people to arrange them into a structure. They will come up with different solutions, reflecting the ways that different users might approach the site.  Try to take account of these different approaches even if you don't entirely agree.

Remember to think about this from the point of view of a user. Your hierarchy should probably not reflect the way your organisation is structured – users want to get information, not learn about your agency’s internal organisation.

You need to think about how many alternatives you have at each level of your hierarchy. If you have too many at each level, users will have to read through an offputting long list of options at each stage. If you have too few alternatives at each level, users will have to make so many choices that they may lose confidence about where they are in your structure, or that they are heading in the right direction.

The best approach avoids both extremes, and has between five and seven alternatives at each level. If you have six at each level, for example, a user can select from over two hundred items by making just three choices.

Develop a Navigation System

Make sure it’s clear where each page fits into the structure of your site. You can use graphics and colour to do this – but make sure that you give other information so that you don’t exclude visually impaired people. Techniques you can use include:

• putting a toolbar on every page of the site, allowing users to move quickly between sections.
• including your name and logo on every page – put the logo at the top left and make it a link to the home page.
• giving every page a simple but descriptive title. A page’s title – the text that appears in the browser’s title bar – is the first part of the page users see, and it’s what appears in lists of "favourites" or "bookmarks."
• including clear headings and subheadings in your pages, so that users can quickly work out if the page has the information they need, and find the part of the text theyare looking for. Keep your use of titles, headings and subheadings consistent throughout your site.

Develop Scenarios for Users

Ask yourself how people will use the site. What will they want to find? Where in your site’s structure will that live? Is it where users expect? How quickly can they get to it? Imagine scenarios for different users looking for different things.

Plan for the Future

As mentioned above, you will want to revise your site and add new material. Consider not just how your structure works now, but how it will expand in the future.

This page is one part of a longer document about getting a website. If you want to read through the whole thing, you'll want to start with the Introduction.

If you are reading through all the parts of this document, the next part is Choosing Design Software.