Organising the contents

The art of organising and arranging the contents of a website is called information design. This includes categorising, dividing and labelling the contents such that the intended audience can readily see what is in the website and where it is likely to be located. The design should entice and encourage exploration of the site by the use of labels and divisions that are interesting and intuitive.

What to do

When designing the information for your website:

• Always consider the way users think of and talk about your organisation, its products and services and the information it deals in, and be sure to use those terms. 
• Identify the content or elements that most users want to access and be sure it is either on the home page or only one click away. 
• Keep the number of clicks a user has to make to get to any information on the site to three or less - ie develop a site with a flat rather than deep structure.
• Keep the labels you give to sections of the site simple and short.
• Be culturally-sensitive when naming sections of the site. 
• Consider making clear divisions between information, products, services, technical aspects of the website, communication and marketing aspects, static information and dynamic information.  

Navigation design

Navigation design is the art of providing users with the means of accessing the contents of the website and related sites.

The art lies in creating for users intuitive and obvious evidence as to where they are, have been and could go in the site, using tools that are easy to use, see and understand, such as buttons and arrows that enable users to access quickly any contents from anywhere in the site.  

What to do

Consider these suggestions about navigation design and raise them with your web development team: 

• Keep it simple and make it blindingly obvious. 
• Provide multiple pathways and tools for users to find information - search tool, site map, menus. 
• Remember that users of your site do not necessarily enter it from the home page, so provide on every page an obvious means of searching the site and returning to the home page. 
• Users are not clairvoyants so do not make them guess or have to remember what is behind menu buttons. 
• If you use icons as a navigation tool, be careful to use ones that your target audience will understand and are large enough to be recognised. 
• Provide signposts for users as to where they are and have been in the site. 
• Be consistent with your use of navigation devices. 
• If users have to scroll down a page in your site to view content, provide a tool that they can click on to take them back to the top of the page.

Choose one of these topics

• The look and feel
• Accessibility