How Deep Should the Hierarchy Be? How Will The User Navigate the Site? How Should the Sections Be Named?

Efficient Web Site Planning 4-13 ■ How Will Content Be Reused? on page 4-14 ■ Will A Manager Be Necessary? on page 4-15 4.11.1 How Deep Should the Hierarchy Be? A deep hierarchy places information at multiple levels where information is heavily categorized. This works well for large organizations or any organization that anticipates growth on the Web site. When planning the Web site, a lot of care should be taken in considering the hierarchy of the web pages within the site. The Web site hierarchy can be as deep as you want, and as deep as you want. You can create as many different sections from the home page as needed, and a section can contain as many sections as needed as well. However, the thing that should be kept in mind while designing the hierarchy is that while the structure can be as wide as needed that is, sections can be nested to any depth, that this can create unwieldy URLs. The wider a section is nested in a Web site, then the longer the URL is to retrieve that information. Usually this is a trivial consideration, but for some designers this can be a major point. Each section listed in the site hierarchy can have a primary page, and a secondary page. Since secondary pages are the pages that have replaceable content, the secondary pages are used to create multiple versions of the pages within a section. The primary page within a section is the page that opens for that section, it could be considered the landing page for that section. 4.11.2 How Will The User Navigate the Site? While you use your site hierarchy to manage your site, visitors use your hierarchy to browse to and locate content. In Site Studio, when you add a navigation fragment to a page template, the fragment reads your site hierarchy and generates links that comprise the overall site navigation. You can easily add, remove, and rename sections of your site, and these changes are seen in your site navigation. You should think carefully about the visitors experience as you construct this hierarchy. 4.11.3 How Should the Sections Be Named? Your site hierarchy has individual sections with names such as Products, Services, and About Us. These names are important. They not only help you organize content on your site, but they display in the navigation on the site, where visitors see it. It is a good idea to revisit these names regularly to ensure that they reflect the content of the sections they represent. Another thing to consider as you assemble your site hierarchy is the Web site address that contributors and site visitors see in their web browser address bar. By default, Site Studio uses the names labels that you give to the sections in your site hierarchy. You can override these values, if you like, by specifying a different path name and page name for each section see Changing the Path Used in a Site Address on page 7-7. It is best to plan this ahead of time to minimize any late changes to the site address or paths used in the address, which could result in broken links or missing shortcuts for contributors and site visitors. 4.11.4 How Reusable Should The Page Templates Be?