Web Site Design Tips for SCS Webmasters

Structure

The structure of your site will be defined by the content to be placed on the web site. A solid site structure will give your site room to grow, will lead you to an effective navigation system, will make it easier for you to manage updates and modifications, and will make it easier for your visitors to find information quickly.

Sketch out your plans

There are many ways to find an effective structure for your web site. We will present one here.

You already have a good overview of the content to present on your web site. Now you must begin to organize your web site into sections. Get a stack of index cards. Take your list of page topics and write one on each index card. You may find that some of your topics are too broad. For example, the topic of "School Sports" may be broken down into many cards, one for each separate sport (baseball, basketball, football, etc).

Once you have all of your topics down on index cards, find a nice big table to spread out all the cards. Try organizing the cards into different hierarchical patterns, and imagine walking through the links to get a feel for the flow that your site should take. You will find groups beginning to form. Some of those groups will feel right grouped even further together. When the arrangement finally feels right you should end up with around 5 or 6 major categories. Under each of those categories you may have subcategories. If your site is rather large, you may even find that your subcategories have subcategories. If you only have two levels in your structure, do not worry. By setting up your site in this fashion you are leaving yourself room to grow as you become more comfortable with managing your Web site.

You will find some pages difficult to place in a category. Examples of these pages include a page for your site's search engine, a "What's New" page, a contact page, a page where visitors can join a mailing list. All of these can be thought of as offshoots of the home page. Try to limit the number of pages falling into this category to avoid an unbalanced site structure.

Now that you have your cards organized, turn the stacks into a written hierarchical chart. You may find it helpful to type this up in your web development software. Later, you can use that document as the text link site map for your site.

Here is an example of some categories and subcategories:

Leave room to grow

Make certain that your structure provides your site with room to grow. There may be pages that will change from year to year but you would like to keep past year's information (courses offered, sports records). You may have information that will be updated every month but you would like to keep an archive of information from past months (school newspaper highlights, student/teacher of the month, calendar pages, PTA newsletters). Keep this in mind as you set up your structure and as you name files.

Online Resources

You can find hundreds of web sites presenting thoughts on web design. If you want additional information on Web site structure, visit the Yale C/AIM WWW Style Manual: Interface Design section - Page 1 and Page 2.