Planning the structure of the site

Visitors to your site should immediately know what the point of your site is; it should also be obvious how and where to get started. As visitors move around your site, they should know where they are, where they need to go, and how to return to a home base. People give up if information isn't easy to find or use.

Organise the site with the most important page on top and the other pages below. Pages on a site break down as:

• Home page. The starting point for the site with links to your main topics
• Main topic pages. For example, support, products, order forms
• Secondary topic pages, usually sub-sets of your main topic pages

For example:

All your pages need links to the main topic pages and to the home page because you don't know how users arrive at your site. They may follow a link from another page or from the results of a search but once they arrive you want them to find their way around.