When you are redesigning your web site, first take stock of the goals and functionality that you want your site to meet or have. When you know your goals and necessary functionality, you can then determine the structure of your site—the navigational structure, various site paths, and links between pages.

Think About Conversions

A conversion occurs when your site visitor takes one of the actions that you want him or her to take. These conversions, and the multiple steps (mini-conversions) that lead to them, are the whole purpose of your site. If you run an e-commerce site, the main goal is for your customers to add products to your cart and complete the entire checkout process. A forum wants users to sign up, read and make posts, and return frequently. Informational web sites want people to return and read or listen often. Some sites are designed to generate leads for salespeople.

You want to structure your site so that it is as easy and as desirable as possible for visitors to complete the desired actions—to be converted.

Think About Spiders

The easier you make it for a search engine spider to get around your site, the more pages it is going to find, index, and (hopefully) rank. If you make the link “tree” simple and easy to follow, you stand a better chance of pleasing a search engine spider.

Think About Confused People

No one is going to know your site as well as you do—click paths for actual visitors can make it seem like your visitors are drunk, lost, or just plain silly. Trust me, though, they usually (and hopefully) aren’t any of those things. They just won’t know your site very well from their initial visit. You need to make the structure or your site intuitive enough that your visitors can understand it quickly without hand-holding.

Another major problem I have seen as I have designed or redesigned web sites is that often the navigation structure is inconsistent. Inconsistency is worse than complexity. Imagine, you land on a site, click to go to a product description, click to the features page, and then want to go back to the product description. Now, though, instead of being first on the list of navigation links, it’s 4th and it’s called “product outline” or “product overview.” Huh? You will lose and confuse your visitors if navigation paths aren’t consistent.

My Basic Process

After designing many sites, I have a basic process that I follow for designing a site. Here are the main steps that I follow:

1. Define Main Areas

   Luckily, you’re not starting from scratch when you start to define the main areas of your site. In fact, there will usually be at least one area for each of the main functions of your site.

   For example, KindredLearning.com has five main functions that it’s supposed to have: store, newsletter, articles, company news, and general company information. After looking at all the different pages that we wanted to include on KindredLearning.com, we decided on six main areas: Four Year Plan (the main selling point for Kindred Learning’s entire business), Products, Newsletter, Articles, News/Updates, and About Us. We added only one area, and we did it in order to make certain educational materials on the site more prominent.

   These main areas make up the “main level” navigation of your site. Your visitors can see the main things they can do or learn about on the site in a glance from anywhere on the site.

2. Assign Pages to Areas

   The next step is to make a list of all of the pages that need to be on your site and then assign each page to one of the areas. Most of the time, it will be clear in which area a page belongs, although you will occasionally have a page that seems to belong in more than one area. It can be really tough to decide where to finally assign this page. You can make every page accessible from many places on the site, but you need to assign every page a “home.” These associations can be changed, but changes need to be made with GREAT care—changes to associations and navigation menus are the number one way to introduce navigational inconsistency into a site.

3. Set Up Levels

   Once you have all your pages assigned to the different areas, you’re ready to impose a little further structure on your site. Some pages will naturally belong to certain sub-areas or categories. You can group these pages together and then create a new “index” type of page to link to each of these pages. You can also link to pages right from the main area page. These groupings, indexes, and assignments create a hierarchy for your site, one which is hopefully clear, natural, and easy to follow.

I usually perform the task of structuring my site on a white board, a large piece of paper (the same way that Carolynn Duncan solves big problems), or an Excel spreadsheet. It usually ends up looking something like this:

Click to Enlarge

You can see the areas along the top (I really like tabbed navigation at the main level), the pages and indexes below them, and the sub pages below them. The hierarchy has worked out clearly and is usually no more than about three levels deep.

At this point, you’ve succeeded in determining the goals of your site, deciding on the functionality necessary to achieve these goals, and mapping the functions and information to a navigational wireframe.

Finally, go through the structure of your site and think about conversions, spiders, and confused people again. If your structure satisfies these needs, then you’re good to go.