A Clever Trick for Website Planning

Sometimes planning the navigation for a website is easy:

• homepage
• about us
• products
• services
• contact

You whip out the plan and get to work.

Sometimes it's not like that.

Yesterday, I was working on a site that has lots of pages. There are many ways that they could be organized. and in fact, on the current site, many of them aren't organized at all -- they live in limbo and are linked from multiple points.

I teach writing in my spare time, so I took a leaf from the book I use when teaching freshmen to organize their papers. I wrote down all the elements which all the stakeholders wanted, each on its own little card. Then I sorted them into piles and tried them in a variety of arrangements until I found the one that seemed most logical and practical.

If the client doesn't like it, I can just shuffle those cards and try again. It's much better than writing the site, only to realize that I have some orphaned page I hadn't put into its proper place.

Too Much Information at Your Website

I'm not talking about indiscreet photos or that rant about your boss that you incautiously posted on your blog. I'm talking about the times when you want to put long documents onto your website.

Sharp Hue is building a site for a local church that wants to include several documents giving details of the theological tenets of their denomination. We know that simply making one of their webpages go on for eleven pages of text won't be the most effective method of delivering that data.

Here are some alternatives:

For Ozark Natural Foods, designer Tom Hapgood decided to make a PDF file of the bylaws and give visitors the option of downloading it. This works well for things that you want to make available to your visitors, but which you don't want to showcase.

You can showcase PDF downloads with graphics and content designed to draw the eye. The web site above, another Sharp Hue project, packs a lot of files into a small space and uses dramatic visuals to make the downloads appealing.

For the North Forty, we went ahead and put all the details on web pages. Having plenty of words like "wedding," "honeymoon suite," "wedding cake," "meeting rooms," and "catered lunch" was good from the point of view of search, and PDF files don't give your site that advantage. So we included the pages, but we made them sub-pages rather than putting them into the main navigation. That way, people who are interested in the Rate Sheet or the Wedding Packages can click on them and go right to them, but the information-dense pages aren't a distraction to people browsing the site.

Sometimes you can link to other websites with more detail. Certainly, you want the search benefits of having plenty of content, but when it's just a matter of providing information for your visitors, another site may actually do the job better.

We gave Bill West Roofing a lot of strong content with an intensive FAQ section and a roofing glossary, but we also included links to manufacturers of the products they use, rather than giving maximum detail on all the different types of shingles available.

Consider your goals for search, the needs of your visitors, and the overall look you want when deciding among the options available to you.

Can You Do Without a Homepage?

Okay, maybe you're not thinking of putting your contact form up all by itself on the internet. But I have had some conversations lately about websites without the traditional homepage.

First, of course, there are blogs that are just blogs. They may have an associated "About Us" page or other related pages, but a blog can be the heart of the website, and the primary landing page. Shan Pesaru and I have been talking about a site that could end up like that.

A site of this kind can be limited in its function. Seth Godin has a site centered on a blog, with additional satellite sites for his books, his services as a speaker, and so on. A vet trying to reach a local audience? It might not work. However, if you want to avoid a home page, this may be an option.

Then there are splash pages -- a page that has little more than the name of the company and a bit of rudimentary navigation, sometimes no more than "enter."

Lee Ann Larkan and I are working on a site right now for an artist who has this idea in mind. She's thinking she can use a nearly blank page to direct people to her portfolio and her blog in a creative and unusual way. One concern with this type of page is that it's hard to get enough content on the splash page to get good rankings with the search engines. The client may not care about search right now, but it could become an issue in time.

Then there are mini sites or commerce-oriented landing pages living at a main site's domain. They may be almost an ad or sign-up sheet for a particular event or project. Marcel Sendrea and I are contemplating how to do a couple of these.

In each of these cases, we're currently thinking about how best to approach the site, and the big question is: do we need a home page?

I think the answer has to come from the user journey.

How is your user going to approach your site, and what will he or she do once arrived? Another site I'm working on right now is for a brick and mortar store. We think that someone going to this website is likely to want the location or phone number of the store, information about their products, or perhaps a look at any current special offers. Customers wanting to get that data quickly would get tired of an artistic splash page pretty quickly. They don't want to click repeatedly to get what they want.

But the visitor to the mini-site we're working on will likely approach it by searching for the product, and that will be an appropriate landing page for that visitor. Should they have to go in through a homepage introducing the company and all the other things they do, or would they perhaps like to get right to the product?

Make a guess, and test the guess before you make up your mind.