Organising your information

Organising your information so it's easy for people to find things easily is important.  It's useful to plan the structure of your information on paper before you start.

Set the order of your pages and navigation structure according to your audience and the usefulness of the information - links to pages like "How to Find Us" and "Contact Us" should be as obvious as possible and visible whatever page the visitor is looking at. We suggest that you have a consistent horizontal navigation bar with links to the most important pages on your site.

Resist the temptation to put your navigation in alphabetical order - "What's On" needs to easy to find rather than at the bottom of a long list!

Try not to make your navigation too complex - if people visiting your site find it difficult to find what they are looking for they will quickly give up! This shouldn't be a problem if your site does not have a lot of pages. If you want a lot of pages about different things try splitting them up into meaningful sections with a navigation specific to each individual section.

Avoid having too many links in each navigation section, and if you have a link to another page in your site within the content on a page make sure there is also a link in the navigation structure too.