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Once you have gathered a range of content ideas, you are
ready to start arranging these into sections and subsections
to form that structure of your web site. A key guiding principle
here is to make sure that the sections and the labels for
those sections are going to make sense to your audience.
Avoid jargon
You need to be wary words or phrases that you are very familiar
with in your own area that may not be familiar to your audience.
For example, lectures and seminars are the bread and butter
of undergraduate study, but how many sixth formers in school
really know what they are in comparison to a lesson?
User purpose not organisational structure
Be careful not to structure your web site in line with the
organisation or unit that it represents as you can't expect
your users to know (or care) about your internal arrnagements.
Try instead to organise it by the purpose that the user has
in mind.
Ask the users
One technique for helping ensure that your site structure
will make sense, it to ask "outsiders", preferably those who
make up your audience, or who have sympathy with your audience's
aims to help you. You can give them a stack of cards with
your content written on the cards, and ask them to arrange
the cards into sensible groupings and to label those groupings
in a way that makes sense to them.
You will find that different groups divide and label the
content differently, but there is usually a lot of overlap.
Take careful note of how the groups labelled the sections.
These are the words that make sense to them in navigating
your material and could prove useful as words to use as links
on your web site.
You will often find that the groups arrange your content
in ways that you had not considered yourself. This tends to
reflect how outsiders see your group and it's services and
can therefore be more understandable to users than a structure
that an insider like you might be able to see!
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