Organizing your Site

On the Organization of Hypertext

People have been considering how to organize hypertext structures since Vannevar Bush wrote his famous "As We May Think" article back in the forties.

Donald Norman's The Design of Everyday Things (New York City: Doubleday, 1989) is an essential guide to the principles you should follow in designing your hypertext corpora.

Another significant book on the subject is George Landow's book, Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology; it is somewhat harder than Donald Norman's book (but not as hard as the title would suggest), and is still worth reading.

The Style Guide for Online Hypertext applies these ideas to hypertext design. Know it like the back of your hand and apply it to your work.

A new work, Enabling Extremely Rapid Navigation in Your Web or Document addresses the factor in Web design I think is most neglected: speed & ease of access. This doc is a must-read, and not just 'cause they link to me.

This is my boiled-down synopsis & synthesis of the ideas I've read in (or gleaned from) some of the above sources:

All hypertext corpora ("sites") should have one mainpage each.
All other pages (i.e., the subpages) should have a link to that mainpage.
The mainpage should link to the subpages in a coherent, tree-like (i.e., hierarchical, like an outline) structure, based on an intelligent grouping of the subpages by topic.
This mainpage may also lead to several different indexes, tables of contents, search engines, or "views" of the corpus; but this added complexity (and the maintenance it implies) is justifiable only if it is significantly useful to the user beyond the usefulness of the clear and organized table of contents.
All subpages should resemble eachother, i.e., thru having been made from (or autogenerated from) a common template, or from drawing on a common Style Sheet
The mainpage should look somewhat different from the subpages (e.g., it could have a banner which the subpages should not have; it could use <H1>, which the subpages should not use).

I believe this follows from established principles of design, besides having plenty of real-world precedents (e.g., there's only one title page in a typical book, and it has different type design than is found elsewhere in the book.).

Give 'em What They Want

The ultimate guide to making a web site clear is this: ask yourself, what are people looking for when they go to this site you're designing? Once you know that, give it to them as clearly and as simply as you can. Examples:

With a reference site or archive (e.g., an English dictionary; an imagebank of starmaps; a library of papers on acoustic phonetics, an archive of revealing pictures of British royalty, etc.), the answer to "what do the readers want" is simple: they want a specific few of the entries/maps/papers/picture/etc., and your job is to build indices and search engines sufficient to get them there.

If you're doing a corporate site, the answer to "what do the readers want" is probably simple: they want information either on the company's product, and/or on how to contact the company. (Note: spinning Pepsi cans, sound samples of corporate jingles or the CEO saying "Welkim to ah saht!", or stupid Java tricks do not figure into what any sane reader wants.)

If the site is a personal page, or a magazine (examples: Blair and geekgirl), it's harder to pin down what the reader wants any more than to say they want something interesting. Now, what's "interesting"? Intelligent and original graphics or text; not obscure HTML tags. However, your mileage may vary.

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