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Structuring your site

Structuring a web site properly is a very important part of any web site. The usability of your site is made up of the ease in which visitors to your site can find the information they are looking for. If you've hidden the important information in a place that is hard to find, your web site would have missed its mark completely.

Here is a checklist to help you to structure your site.

Step One	Work out the objectives of your site. Why are you building a web site?
Step Two	Determine who will be your visitors. Make a list of the types of groups who will visit your site - students, potential students, other universities.
Step Three	Ask two questions - what do these groups want from my site and what do they want to do? a. If possible, try to think like a visitor and keep focussed on what your target audience wants from your site. This is very important, as too many sites are too inward-looking and, in turn, provide visitors with what the organisation thinks they want, rather than what they actually want. b. If you find that you have several audiences, you may need to offer different paths through the site to help each group find what it needs.
Step Four	You can now develop a menu system, using the information you currently have on hand. a. The objectives of your site. b. The information these groups want from your site and what they want to do. Because visitors to your web site want information, the site's purpose should be immediately obvious and the site should be easy to navigate. Great content is no use if people can't find it.
Step Five	Now organise these elements into a logical structure. You may find that developing a flowchart is a good way to visualise the site as you are mapping it out. You can also see how some sections need to follow others within your site.
Step Six	The major navigation elements of the web site should now be obvious. For example, you've probably identified which sections of the site should be accessible from every page.
Step Seven	Try to structure your site's pages so that each page doesn't either scroll on forever, or only have one or two paragraphs. If you do have a page that requires a lot of scrolling, break it up into pages of four or five paragraphs or edit it. If you have a page that only says one or two lines, then incorporate it into another page.