Wednesday, June 10, 2009

Turn your site map upside down

We've been working with a client on redeveloping their website from its present incarnation. This current site has a homepage with an introduction animation and some navigation. This in-turn leads you to further pages (with even more under that).

Creating a site map of the pages you get a typical tree structure, with the homepage at the top and all the content on the lower 'branches'.









However, does this actually meet the needs of the orgainsation's (potential and existing) customers and search engines?

Customers want instant information about the organisation. They want to know some of the stuff on the lower levels and don't necessarily want to have to forrage for it through the navigation to find it.

Search engines also want content to spider and understand the site. The more this content is relevant and updated, the more likely the spiders are to return.

This therefore means exposing the content as quickly and effectively as possible and dispensing with conventional information hierarchy... or in other words turning your site map upside down! Content rightly therefore becomes the empowering factor.

When mentioning this to an Information Architect friend of mine he did questions whether this would necessarily work for all sites, especially those that have significant content and functionality.
However, is this not what the BBC news homepage and other such resources try to do?

2 comments:

Boudewijn said...

This is a topic very close to my heart. I've always thought that sites with a too rigid structure (or in fact any site you can make a sitemap of) miss the point of the Internet.

On a website, information can be hierarchically ordered, but you should offer at least 2 alternative options (search, keywords, etc). There are many strategies for your users to find information and if in fact you have a lot of information (like the BBC) you should cater to as many of those strategies as possible.

I also think sites with too much of an introductory page miss the point. That introductory page is interesting only once, so basically you're saying to your visitors: we don't really think you'll visit twice ;-)

Heck, I could go on for days on this subject ;-)

Hayden Sutherland said...

Making your users work too hard to get at your content is never a good idea and the same goes for search engine spiders.
There is obviously a balance between showing too much and not showing enough, but this balance depends not just upon your content but upon your readers as well.