ASM Development - taking websites beyond design

Web Design And Development – Is Your Site Well Organized?

One of the problems that most web sites encounter is that of structure or organization. Small focused websites can often have a distinct advantage over larger sites in that it is far easier to manage the site’s structure. Imagine controlling the internal structure of a site that has several hundred, or worse still, several thousand pages. And these sites exist, some of them very tightly structured, others not structured at all.

The organization of your site goes well beyond navigation. In fact, navigation is the end result – not the start. When putting together a web site, you need to carefully consider each page and how important it is to the site’s overall integrity. For example, if you have a privacy policy, should that link to every page or should it only link back to the main page? Likewise, should every page link to the privacy page? That’s an easy decision to make, but now multiply that across every page.

A well though through site structure should then lead naturally to how you will link each page, and how you present those links to your visitors; that is both the search engines and humans as they are both important considerations. By keeping a tight control on your site’s structure, you should be able to funnel your visitors to a desired end result.

Visitors to your site need to be able to find relevant information fairly easily. If they are there to buy a product, the process should be smooth and easy to follow. For search engines, the process is similar. They should be able to determine the structure of your site, which pages are important, and which keywords are associated to those pages. The larger your site, the harder it becomes, yet the larger your site, the more important it becomes.