Suppose websites were laid out like supermarkets. Instead of being able to dive straight in and find the information you need, imagine the following nightmare scenario. . .
At the entrance lobby you are detained for several minutes. This room is large and quite flashy-looking, though you can't actually do anything in it. Then a man jumps out from the corner and frisks you without warning. If you don't have the latest version of a particular brand of reading-glasses, he will whisk you off to A Recommended Opticians to get a pair.
Eventually he lets you into the website/supermarket proper. At this point, instead of being bombarded by special offers and new lines, you're dumped in a very bare, poky and dusty little room that looks like it hasn't been touched for months. At its centre stands a tall totem pole of indecipherable signs and symbols. These point to several dozen doors, but at least the doors have fairly understandable labels.
You poke your head through the nearest door (labelled "CLEAN!"), and see a long shopping aisle, lined with shelves of soap and binbags. Then the penny drops - each door from The Room With The Totem Pole leads to one of the shopping aisles that radiate out from the room, like spokes of a wheel.
As it happens, this morning you don't need any soap or rubbish bags. Your shopping list is for butter, eggs and a bottle of wine. So you go back through the same door and arrive in the Totem Pole Room again. But you are puzzled. It looks remarkably like the Totem Pole Room, only the pole is now down the far end of the room - and all the doors are in a different order.
Where's the butter? You try a door marked "DAIRY". You're in a long aisle. After about 30 yards there's still no sign of eggs or butter (or anything edible for that matter). Just stacks of office planners. Another 50 yards. More office stationery. Another 50 yards. More office stuff. This is a very long aisle, stretching as far as the eye can see, with no turn-offs in sight. And still no dairy products. Just more calendars and office planners. Then the penny drops - the sign should have been for "DIARIES", only it has been misspelt.
You turn around. And face a blank wall - the corridor behind you has shrunk to nothing. Somehow the door back to the Totem Pole Room has been conjured away. You turn around again and look towards the far horizon, and realise the only way out is to go forward. . .
I'M not making this up. The structures of most Irish websites really are as bizarre and confusing as a Lewis Carroll story or Franz Kafka novel. Do you really want your entire site (or a major subsection of it) to be a confusing labyrinth? Or should it be one very, very long page - which is a bit like having to check through every single item in a supermarket even though you're just looking for a few bars of chocolate?
A much better alternative is to plan and structure the information into clear sections and navigation systems (just as a supermarket structures itself into general departments and aisles, and helpdesks and check-out points). The following is a checklist of 10 ways to plan and build a visitor-friendly site with a clear and solid structure.
1 "Wide" not "deep"
A "deep" structure, with many subdirectories and nooks and crannies, means your users will have to drill down through far more levels to get to a particular piece of information. Instead, try to keep the structure "wide" or "shallow" - your visitors can work faster because they have to make fewer decisions.
Another bonus of not having directories within directories within directories is that your pages will have shorter URLs (Web addresses) for visitors to type.
2 "Lists" not "flowcharts"
When you're working out what to have on the home page - the "top level" of the site - and in the subsections that lead off it, there's a natural temptation to use flow-charts and diagrams. They sound great on paper, but I find there's an equal temptation to add too many extra layers or levels.
Instead, make a shortlist of the eight or ten main subsections of your site. Then subdivide each of these into a list of the main pages within each subsection.
3 Take the user's point of view
Many organisations and corporations structure their sites from the point of view of their departments or committees or divisions. Big mistake. You can't assume that ordinary visitors to your site will know this organisational structure. Instead, restructure the information around the users' perspectives and their likely needs.
4 Stay short
Avoid pages that are over two or three screenfuls long. Break long pages into four or five shorter ones, so that the information is more "digestible". If you really do need to have longer pages, try to put anchor links at the top/bottom of them to make them easier to zoom through. There's nothing worse than having to scroll through half a novel (well, a page that's 80 or 90k in size) to find that the information you want isn't there.
5 File-names
Have a consistent file naming system, particularly for HTML pages. It's good housekeeping to have ".html" file-extensions rather than jumping back and forth between ".html" and ".htm". And stick to lower-case filenames (rather than a mixture of UpPer and loWeR) just in case you have to host your site on a server that is case-sensitive. Try to keep the filenames relatively short but understandable (ordinary users won't make sense of page1.html, page2.html etc).
A shallow site structure and shorter URLs also mean that people typing them manually are less likely to make mistakes. Another reason is the email factor. While search engines are the most common way that users get to new sites, the second most common way is by email, such as a recommendation from a friend. And shorter URLs won't wrap across a line feed.
6 TITLE tags
It only takes a few seconds to write a meaningful "TITLE" tag in your HTML's headers. The title tag is often part of the key information sucked up by search engines as they classify your site. It's also the phrase that turns up in a brower's "GO" menu - helpful for users who want to retrace their steps.
7 Give users a map
The handiest map is a "common navigation system". Many amateur-looking sites have a main menu on the home page, then when you click on any of these links the menu disappears, and the only way to see it again is to click the back button. This is a bit like a supermarket where you go down a one-way aisle and have to return to the front door before you can go down any other aisle.
Instead, make sure that every page has this common menu - also called a "central navigation bar" - so that users are always one click away from any main subsection. And keep the menu in a consistent place on every page.
8 Cut the clutter
Every element, text description or image should be worth its download time and effort. Get rid of the clutter and the flashy graphics that only detract from your message. And ask yourself do you really need a "splash screen"`? This is webspeak for that extra page that greets visitors before they enter the site proper.
It might have fancy graphics and a message along the lines of "Welcome to Acme's website - click here to enter". Splash screens are much favoured at the moment by advertising agencies and design departments, but they serve very little functional purpose. For most users they are slow-loading, time-wasting, uninformative and even obtrusive, and simply add one extra and unnecessary level that gets in the way of the site's information (and might even delay them each time they return to the bookmarked site).
9 Keep it topical
If the home page never changes (and the central navigation bar is on all the other pages), what incentive is there for visitors to return to it? For example, you could give summaries of the latest news items, with links to the full articles on separate pages.
10 How do they contact you?
Finally, by all means have a separate page with contact details about your organisation, from fax numbers to email directories. But you will make life easier for your visitors if every page on your site includes a general email contact address.
Within the seas of information on the Internet, your own site can be an island of order, or a chaotic maze. In a sense your visitors won't notice a well-planned structure, and they will move through the information on your site without being overly conscious of it.
But no matter how good your site's content might be, a bad structure sends out all the wrong signals. It only frustrates visitors and makes the information much harder to move through and use.
Michael Cunningham (mick@volta.net) is MD of the Internet development company Volta.