Hands on: Organise your website's information

When you have a large website, one of the trickiest things is making sure that people can find all the information it contains.

If there are only a few pages, then it’s not a hard task, but when you have dozens of pages, with lots of useful content, it can be tricky.

One of the sites I manage has a vibrant forum, and also plenty of FAQs, downloadable guides, and other useful reference material. But, by and large, most people skip the FAQs and the guides, and when they want to know something they post a question in the forum. That’s understandable, but if the response to questions is always to say, “Please check the FAQs”, you can run the risk of looking a little unwelcoming to newcomers.

One solution to this is to flag useful information. In forums, this is often done with ‘sticky’ threads, which appear at the top of the list of posts. While they sometimes work, often people don’t bother to read them. Even adding a reminder in large text to the top of the new message posting box doesn’t seem to help.

Adding links to the forum page doesn’t always help, either. I’ve tried adding large buttons and dropdown menus with helpful labels such as “FAQs about…” and they’re still frequently missed by visitors. I’d be interested to hear from other readers how they deal with this sort of issue.

Site navigation
Good site navigation is obviously key to making sure people can find the information they need. There are various approaches to achieve this, all of which I’ve tried at various times – helpful icons, Javascript navigation menus and even framesets, which these days probably bring about a collective shudder.

While framesets aren’t a recommended way of doing things, they did help achieve a useful look for some sites, with a navigation panel on screen all the time, providing easy access to all the different parts of your site, while the main content changes.

These days, though, you can achieve much the same effect using CSS instead, which also means that with a little scripting, you can degrade things gracefully. I’ve just been redesigning one of my sites with a three-column layout; there’s a left-hand navigation panel, with links to all the main areas of the site, the main part of the screen for the content, and a right-hand panel for secondary navigation, which changes to provide information relevant to whichever page you’re looking at.