Organizing Your Site

Sequences
Hierarchies
Webs
The three methods

All websites need a form of organization, with out it, your site will be a complete mess and no one will know how to get around your site and your viewers will decide to leave. Organization is very important. Try to keep your website well organized to avoid confusion. If the viewer does not know where they are and how to get back, then they will exit the site because they are lost, confused, and frustrated. The goal of your website is to provide easy navigation (which can be achieved through organization) so the viewer is able to browse around and find the neccessary information.

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Sequences

Secquencing involves going from one page to the next. So basically there is a back, main, and next page button. This type of organization is great for training sites. So basically your click the next button to view the next page which is a continuation of page that you are on. If you click the back or previous button, it will go to the page before the page you are on. And the main button will go back to the main/home/index page. This is a way of organization information that comes in order of sequence.

Of course, other than that, you can have more complex sequences where there are links within the page to go into another section explaning a certain part of the page that's very complicated to explain. It is up to you how you want to plan your page.

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Hierarchies

Hierarchy is probably the most common way of organizing a website. There is generally a main page that links to sections and within those sections, there are many pages that is related to that section and is linked from the page. It is where you have folders within a site and each folder contains different things and things within each folder is related to one another. This form of organization requires you to be very organized since it can become very messy later on as you progress and update.

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Webs

The webs type of organization involves the linking of many pages within the site and many pages outside of the site. It generally gets too confusing with all the links because they may sometimes be random and viewers will not know where they can find the information they are looking for. It is not the best way to organize your site. It is better to organize your website with the two previous methods mentioned above.

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The three methods

In the three methods, sequences is the simplest form of organization and webs is the most complex.

Sequences : Simplest, least amount of links, any user interface, linear (story like structure), predictable
Hierarchies : Moderate, moderate amound of links, any user interface, linear/non-linear, some what predictable
Webs : Hard to understand, alot of links, advanced user inferface, non-linear, not predictable

So usually if you have a simple website where there isn't a lot of information or the information is all on one topic, then you should use seuqences. Most webs on the net uses hierarchies, it is quite simple to understand and it provides both users and viewers clearity. Depending on your website, you should make a wise and clear decision upon which method or type of organization you should use.