Various Types Of Site Structure
A website, as the name suggests, is a message center which has a lot of information about the organization or the business or the services or the products displayed. While organizing the information, one should always remember to follow a simple method to organize the details. A clustered structure would confuse the readers. It would also become difficult for them to retrieve the required information. Information should be arranged in such a way that it should retain the interest of the viewers and motivate them to move further deep inside the website.
To overcome such confusions, standard structures were introduced to sort the information in websites. Sequences, Hierarchies and the Web are the three types of standard formats which are currently used by the web world. Use of a combination of these standards is also possible and used in many cases. These are the fundamental structural themes, which govern the navigational interface in the case of all the websites.
The simplest structural theme which is considered easy to organize any type of information is the sequential theme. The information is sorted and arranged according to a logical order. Arrangement could be in chronological order or alphabetically, or in some other specific order, progressing from the main topic to the sub topics. This is the methodology, which is considered the most appropriate for organizations and informational websites like those of encyclopedias, dictionaries, directories and glossaries. In this case, the pages are linked to each other in a sequential order on a one to one basis.
The most complex chunks of information are normally arranged in the hierarchical format. This model is in practical use and is considered to be easy to use and understand as this is the basic format which everyone is aware of right from their childhood. In this case, all the links are made available from the website’s Home Page and in turn all the individual pages are also linked to the Home Page. This option available in the individual pages helps the viewers to return back to the Home Page in case of confusion. The technique also ensures that the visitors would not be lost in the crowd even if there should be hundreds of web pages in the website.
The web theme of organizing the information literally links all the pages in the website with each other and in some cases even links the pages with other sites. Though it sounds complicated, it is welcomed by many Internet users who wish to move free around the website instead of moving in a sequence or hierarchy. In practice, the structure is considered to create lot of chaos and difficulties for the users to understand as they might not be able to predict how the pages are linked. The system can be adapted and used in small websites with minimum number of pages.
Web Design develops all the websites based on the structure themes discussed above. The themes selected are first suggested to the client and the development phase begins after receiving the confirmation from the client. The systematic procedure followed is what gives a well-defined structure to the website.
