How do you work out the best structure for your website? Whether you?re starting from scratch, or planning a review of your site, what?s the best way to work out which pages to use and where to put them? How do you make sure that you don?t confuse your visitors with too many pages for them to navigate their way through? What can you do to make sure they can find what they?re looking for, quickly and easily?

We?re building a new website for one of our clients and working out the best structure was one of the challenges we needed to overcome early on in the process. The original site was set up some years ago and was not easy to update. The new site is being built on WordPress, so that we can keep it updated and make sure it provides visitors with what they need. The old navigation was just a long list of pages on one side of the site, so I used a technique that I learnt recently ? Mind Mapping ? to work out a simpler structure for the site.

I started by placing the Home page in the centre of a sheet of paper. Next I looked at the existing pages to see which were the most important and came up with four. I wrote these around the Home page, with different coloured lines leading from the Home page to the second level pages. It was then relatively easy for me to allocate each of the other pages to one of the second level pages. Knowing what ?sections? I was working with made it easy to place the third level pages into the structure, seeing which pages worked well together.

The end result is that instead of giving website visitors a long and confusing list of pages to choose from, visitors to my client?s site will have a much shorter list to look at, which guides them quickly to what they need. If you?ve not tried Mind Mapping before, or you?ve not tried it for improving the structure of your website, then give it a go.  There are plenty of books you can read, or websites you can look at for tips. I learnt the basics from  Illumine Training.