lecture 3: site structure II

Through thinking about your site structure and navigation you can guide users through the site in the way that is most appropriate. Here are some general themes for web site structures. More details are in chapter 4 of the printed booklet. There are also lots of links to examples of these structures on the resources page.

These are basically arranged in order of "control"; e.g. the top category involves the least control over which order readers should visit each page, the fourth category the most. The exception is the last category where - if sites like this really exist - the visitor has complete control.

• galleries are designed to be randomly browsed. The trick to good gallery design is to give the user information about where they are, and, when necessary, information about what they're looking at. Make it easy for them to move from "room" to "room". http://www.spillway.com is a good example of a gallery although it has a terrible "entrance hall".
• catalogues are used when visitors arrive looking for a specific product or bit of information but don't know exactly where to find it. The trick to good catalogue design is to make it as easy as possible for them to target the information. Good search facilities, or indexes, are vital. Amazon is probably the best known online catalogue.
• brochures or reference sites are the most common. They usually introduce a single company, educational topic, person, band, place etc; think of them as an entry in the huge online encyclopaedia that is the WWW. There is therefore a sense of introducing something, and when you do this, you do need to think about the order in which you introduce things even if you don't want to fully restrict visitors' ability to move around. This site, basically, is a reference site ("brochures" are more commercial but are basically the same thing).
• narratives enforce a particular order of browsing. They are usually offline texts that have been directly converted to the WWW format (and are therefore a bit of a waste of that format). An example is this site which presents the complete text of Jane Eyre.
• I mention in the booklet some sites where hypertext is more integral to the structure but I've now come to think this site structure would reflect one where all structure was controlled, or imposed, by the visitor and not the author. I still don't know whether sites like this really exist or are even possible in HTML.

It will help you to try and think, at least in general terms, about which of these general themes your site is most closely related to. When writing larger sites it definitely helps to know how controlled you want the visitors' browsing to be. This is, broadly, the field of information management and there is a lot more to it than this course can hope to cover. But I hope this has at least served as an introduction.