Once your site grows to more than half a dozen or so pages you will need a logical data structure so that your visitors can find your way through it. What seems logical and natural to you may seem confusing to your visitors who may be at the early stages of researching their needs.
Reverting to my search, earlier this year, for a wood burning stove I had to learn a complete new vocabulary before I could make a reasoned choice, and although I did this by physically driving round the available suppliers, I was still astounded by the number of issues involved.
- Stove output - measured in kilowatts
- Stove fuel - wood or dual-fuel
- Stove dimensions
- Stove material - cast iron or steel
And that's just for starters.
Don't Make Me Think
One of the first principles of web design, after the 'three click' rule, is the 'don't make me think' rule. Your site must lead your visitors step-by-step to their destination without imaginative leaps and without having always to head back to your home page before setting out on the next journey.
Structure in CMS Sites
One of the strengths of CMS sites is their ability to attract content notwithstanding the IT skills or lack of IT skills of the contributors. In fact many CMS sites are deliberately set up as 'Wiki' to attract visitor contributions.
Whilst you might give visitors permission to add their own material in the form of blogs, comments, forums and even original articles, you would not give them access to your menu structure. They need to categorise their own input so that it will appear in an appropriate place on your site.
Our Own Categories
We like to set up genuine sites as we assess products like Drupal or Joomla. In our case we were setting up a commercial site designed to bring new internet entrepreneurs together with the people that can help them get up and running. So we have three main categories
- About Us: general pages about the site, and us as owner/operators.
- eEnrepreneurs: people who need help to get an eBusiness up and running.
- eProviders: people who can provide that help.
Sub-categories
Within these categories we have sub categories. Taking the eProviders main category we have:
- Content Providers
- Website Providers
And within Content Providers we have
- Copy Writers
- Image Providers and Manipulators
Setting up your Joomla Categories
- Login to the Back End of your site (yoursite/administrator>
- Click on the Category Manager short cut.
- Click on 'Add a New Category'
- In the 'Title' field write "eProviders"
- Click on 'Save and Close'
- Click on 'Add a New Category' again
- This time type "Content Providers" but this time scroll down to 'Parent"
- Scroll down within parent to reach "eProviders"
- Click on 'Save and Close'
Now you can carry on by adding "Copy Writers" with "Content Providers" as its parent.
Post a Comment