Defining website structure

Posted on May 31, 2007 
Filed Under Planning

The importance of defining website structure is end user usability. If you make it easy for them to find information on your site, they stay longer and come back for more. Planning ahead and creating a good site structure will also help you in the future when you need to add or expand your website.

Simple questions to ask are:

  1. How will the user navigate through the site? Menu based, text links, buttons?
  2. How will the user complete the task at the website?

Website structure is the overall picture of the website and assists in the planning stages of your site.

An example of a simple website structure for a 5 page small business website would be:

  1. Main or home page
  2. Services page - information about the company services.
  3. Products or product catalog - a page or area displaying the products for sale.
  4. Contact page - how customers can get in touch with you.

  5. About page - additional information about your business or company

Website Structure

Additional items that can also be included are:

Sitemaps

All good websites have a sitemap. A sitemap is an index of all the important webpages within a website. Sitemaps are also useful for search engines, because it lets the engines know which pages are available for crawling.

Resource: SiteMaps.org

Sometime if I cannot find information within the website, I will usually look for the sitemap link. On most websites, the sitemap link is located at the bottom of the home page or the bottom of every page listed on the website.

The information you use to build your website structure can also be used within your sitemap.

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