Sometimes planning the navigation for a website is easy:
- homepage
- about us
- products
- services
- contact
You whip out the plan and get to work.
Sometimes it’s not like that.
Yesterday, I was working on a site that has lots of pages. There are many ways that they could be organized. and in fact, on the current site, many of them aren’t organized at all — they live in limbo and are linked from multiple points.
I teach writing in my spare time, so I took a leaf from the book I use when teaching freshmen to organize their papers. I wrote down all the elements which all the stakeholders wanted, each on its own little card. Then I sorted them into piles and tried them in a variety of arrangements until I found the one that seemed most logical and practical.
If the client doesn’t like it, I can just shuffle those cards and try again. It’s much better than writing the site, only to realize that I have some orphaned page I hadn’t put into its proper place.
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