Datasheet
Figure 1-2: A rough content inventory for our site. How do we make sense of it all?
From Inventory to Hierarchy
So, how do we begin to make sense of our Web site so that others might do the same? To begin, it helps to
consider your site not as a mass of pages, but as a hierarchy of information. In fact, it’s no accident that most
site maps look something like a tree: the home page sits at the top (or root) of the tree, with the various areas
of the site branching out from it. As your users traverse through the different levels of the tree, each branch
becomes more specialized than the one that precedes it. Traveling down from the root of the site down to the
individual pages, the user is drilling down through these branches to find the content that matters most to
them. Because of this, it’s your responsibility to make the order of those branches as intuitive as possible.
So, let’s say that after an exhaustive amount of research and user interviews, we discover that the audi-
ence for WebMag 5000 can be broken into three types of users:
❑ Readers. These people are most interested in the reviews, articles, and tutorials published on
our site. They’re mainly consumers of information, so it’s important to get them the information
they need as quickly as possible.
❑ Writers. In one sense, this group is the lifeblood of our ’zine. Because all of our writers work on
a volunteer basis, we must create a prestigious home on our site for the features they produce.
Their name — and their work — should be featured prominently, in the hopes that they’ll pro-
vide additional content in the future.
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