Website Architecture

So Rudy Limeback makes some good analogies to the architecture of a website in this piece.  It is definitely important to have a proper scheme for a site when creating it or else users won't want to use it.  It is easy to tel when you have found a site which is not properly formatted and it is often painful to use.

A website is cut up into basic sections. The top level is the homepage and most important general pages.  Under each of those or the next level of pages which are specific to the page it is under. As Limeback puts it, there are many different ways you could organize a site with many pages.  All link to each other on every page, each only links to the page above or below, or somewhere in between. The balance of the pages on each level is what is important. The navigation from page to page needs to make sense, and should not be a difficult process.  I like this rule of thumb put out, that a page should only be up to three clicks away from any other page, assuming the site is only two levels deep.

I have been to some sites like this in the past, where the navigation is atrocious, but I couldn't remember any, so I went to google and after some searching I found this site for a hotel in Switzerland, I couldn't even figure out how to get back to the homepage after 1 click, and the navigation is all over the place (This site is a little different too since it doesn't run HTML either). To quote a comment someone made regarding the site, "It's like a really bad video adventure game".

There are some expectations for websites, not following them when you should can lead to some big problems with users.

Bonus site:  http://www.oscar-bruch.de/ its not in English, but thankfully, the site includes a page labeled "sitemap" which acts to explain how the site is laid out.  Perhaps if I spoke German I could navigate a little easier, but I find it questionable to find a need to include a map of a site that is only 25 pages.  However the sitemap page is a useful representation of what Limeback was talking about.