Website organization

Most websites are not tried out on novice visitors before they are published on the Internet. Why is this?

One common reason is that they have 'grown like Topsy'. You may not be aware of how easy it is (in principle) to publish a web page if you have a basic package or can understand coding languages such as HTML or Javascript. A book may take months or even years to produce - but a simple web page can be put together and published on the Internet in a matter of minutes. It is very difficult to resist the temptation of publishing web pages as soon as they are written.

A good website will have more and more pages added or changed over time. This makes it difficult to stick to the original structure.

But this is also one of the strengths of the worldwide web. A book is inevitably out-of-date as soon as it is written (and much of it probably so at least a year earlier). By contrast, a web page can be edited to include today's news. Also, a book remains the same until the next edition (probably several years away) but web pages can be updated and modified as and when required.

A second common reason is that a website may be too professional. It might have been conceived and built by a project team. With experts on board there is a likelihood of just a touch of arrogance. The best team concepts of discussion and agreement may be used. But such a site has not been designed to meet the reality of users' expectations.

At HRM Guide we used the structure of a general HR text (Human Resource Management in a Business Context) and built a website around that framework. This gave us a major advantage: a structure covering the broad territory of HRM that had been developed and tested over 10 years of teaching and writing about the subject. We call this section HR Topics. Within it you will find themed sub-sections (for example, recruitment and selection) with hundreds of pages of articles and links. Worth exploring.

In this series

Introduction

Down to basics

Website addresses

Page addresses

Link lists

HR and onsite searching

Website organization