Decide how to structure the content you are providing
Once you have decided what types of content you have on your site,
this step is easy, but still a lot of work. This is where you define the
complete hierarchy of information, page by page, category by category.
Obviously, if you have a database-driven site, with tens of thousands of
products, you don't need to include every product in your hierarchy, but
you should include every category. In this case, it is also likely that
the categories will change fairly regularly, but create an initial
hierarchy, so that you can see what you're dealing with for the next
steps of planning. Consider the following extract from a plan for an
imaginary sports website:
- Home Page
- Informational Articles
- Skiing
- Where to find good skiing?
- How to put your skis on.
- Swimming
- Should you shave your legs?
- News Articles
- Skiing
- Swimming
- Famous swimmer fails drug test
- Archive
- August 2005
- Skiing
- Preview of the 2005 World Cup
- Swimming
- Governing body "tough on drugs"
- Products
- Skiing
- Skis
- Cross-country skis
- Downhill skis
- Jumping skis
- Snowboards
- Swimming
Obviously, this is just an extract to illustrate all the important
parts of a hierarchical structure. You may not have all the sections
shown above, but hopefully you'll have far more content in each of the
sections you do have.
The structure will look very similar to a design for a navigation
system, but that is not what you are designing here. A successful design
here will make designing your navigation system easier, but the two are
not the same. This is a logical structure for your content, without any
consideration for how it will look, or how easy it will be to navigate
by a user. In the example above, I would create three navigation systems
based on this structure, one for each content type.
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