Architecture and Design

Web Site Architecture 101: This article describes the different levels of a website and how to use them to navigate and the three different steps to accomplish having a successful, easy to use website. It first starts out by describing the "top level", which usually shows the different pages through a navigation pane, or a menu at the top. They spend a log of time talking about whether or not to have the "home" button greyed out and whether to have a home page at all. The "second level" is the level of pages that go more in depth from the first pages - the sub menus. Every website should be accessible in no more than three clicks. I'm not sure if I necessarily agree with this, because some websites are a lot more complex (not to say that they are not easy to navigate) and they need more than three clicks. Finally, they talk about balancing the levels. Meaning that you have roughly the same amount of sub pages underneath each top level page. This, again, can not always be the case.

Designing the Interface and Navigation: This one goes into talking about how users interact with a page and how they navigate around a certain website. A simple plan to start with to build a user-friendly website might include just listing off what you want your website to do. Web designers need to keep in mind that not all webpages will be viewed on the same sized screen. Also, no one wants to scroll horizontally to see a whole page. Creative new ways to show navigation panes are nice, but they still need to be somewhat familiar to users so that someone won't get so confused that they just want to leave your site. There can be more than one way to navigate, but consistency is what will bring users back to your page, so repetition in navigation works really well. They talk about having an index or site map, which I don't necessarily agree with because it just takes up a lot of space and I've never actually used one. I feel like if your navigation pane works well enough, you shouldn't need an index or site map.

Web Architecture from 50,000 feet:  URI locators in the Universal Web are pretty important - apparently. It's the web's way of finding it's way around and making it so people can find things again. They talk in the article about how the URI scheme is a potential disaster, because the distinction between names of websites and their addresses blur together. The most well-known URI is HTTP. The protocols used on the web help provide a more clear distinction between HTTP functionality and different web services.