Once you have decided on the content of your site, you need to work out how it will be organised.
A clear logical structure helps users to understand the site, which means they can more easily work out where they are and where the content they want is likely to be found.
Simple structure
The simplest structures involve dividing the content into a few different sections. Small sections may end up as a single page of the site; larger sections may end up as multiple pages.
For example, the cake recipe site could be organised into the following sections:
- Recipes
- Glossary
- About the author
Hierarchies
For larger sites, it may be useful to have more than one level of sections. For example, if there are a lot of recipes in the site, you might want to divide the Recipes section into several subsections:
- Sponge cakes
- Fruit cakes
- Chocolate cakes
- Other
This is a hierarchical structure. For a more complex example of a hierarchy, consider this site itself:
Hierarchical structure of this site
Other structures
There are other ways to structure sites. For example, a site with a daily comic strip might have a structure based purely on date. Some sites might even use a customisable or AI-based organisation, where content is actually reordered by the computer to best serve each user. But structured hierarchies are most useful for simple sites.
