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Site Architecture & You (It's Not As Dull As It Sounds)

© Christopher Cummings

Last time, we discussed the importance of sprinkling breadcrumb trails throughout your site to give your visitors:

• context, so they can better interpret the meaning of the page
• direct access to a higher level of the site (for continued searching)

But before you can guide your visitors to their next stop on your site, you need to know what the next stops are (or could be) -- you need to map your site, to chart out its boundaries.

To create this map, you need to understand the point of your site as well as its architecture.

What's "site architecture?"

Really, site architecture translates into the design and layout of a given website, including the layers of related pages connected by links.

Think about that for a moment.

Successful websites are built from pages that fit together in a logical system. The site's graphical elements and layout should be consistent, so the site has one cohesive look.

Look at eBay or Adobe or Redbook. All of these sites (and many more) offer a clear, consistent user experience: No matter where you are on the site, it's easy to see where you are; easy to find the major subdivisions; easy to see where you're going.

And of course, the content's good too.

NOTE: I'm not going to argue aesthetics here. Because everyone has their own idea of what a good site looks like.

But certainly, there are fundamental elements that a site must have in order to be successful. The site must be:

• easy to use
• easy to understand
• simple to navigate

One thing to consider in laying out your site, is commonality.

Observe different, successful websites. Do they follow a trend in terms of look and feel and presentation? Then maybe they're onto something.

Right now, there are millions of websites with different levels of organization and layout. Adopting common elements -- especially common navigation elements -- could be very useful to visitors to your site.

In his article, A Standard For Site Organization, Greg Knauss argues that a selection of well-chosen and smartly named root level directories could help people navigate your site without being familiar with it.

That is, visitors would always be able to find:

• Help by going to /help/
• Site updates by going /new/
• Search by going to /search/
• ... and so on.

Some sites, are already attempting something like this. For example: http://www.eonline.com/News/ takes you to the latest entertainment news stories at E! Online.

Note: The capital N in /News/ is a problem; if you go to /news/ -- lower case n -- you get a file not found. The URL is case sensitive. For E! to not have a lowercase news that works is just dumb, dumb, dumb.

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