Website structure development
Having your own website in the modern world of digital industry development, information technology, and globalization is a big part of success for every company, brand, enterprise, business, and many other structures. It allows you to communicate with customers, sell goods and services, inform, advertise, compete, and develop. But is everything so simple?
For the successful operation of a website in the global network, its full functioning and achievement of its goals, it is not enough just to create it. To achieve all of the above goals, you need to design the site structure.
The correct structure helps to facilitate site promotion, affects key quality indicators, and provides not only usability, but also good indexing. Thanks to the logical structure, it is easier for the user to navigate and more pleasant to stay on the site. Therefore, the person will spend more time on the site and not close the browser tab after a few seconds, starting to search for a similar Internet resource.
What is website structure
The website structure is a clear and simple site menu, convenient forms for entering the site and ordering goods/services. The user builds his website interaction model based on previous experience. Therefore, it is important to meet the expectations of the target audience of consumers. The logical site structure should be quite predictable, adapted to different categories of users, and simplified. At the same time, you should not rule out extraordinary decisions because the modern user always values originality more.
Website structure development is necessary for:
Each resource has an external and internal configuration. The external structure means the development of the correct and user-friendly location of the upper and lower block of the page with helpful information and the menu in general. The internal structure includes ranking by content categories and delimitation of headings.
How to create a site structure
When designing the site, you must first determine the type of its structure. It will depend on the activities, goals, and consumer audience of the company/brand/business/enterprise.
There are the following types of site structure:
- linear: It is the simplest type of structure, when one page organically passes to the next, providing information along the chain;
- the linearly branched resource structure has a consistent series of transitions, periodically providing the consumer with choices;
- a complex, multi-level tree structure is suitable for sites with a large number of branches, categories/subcategories;
- the block diagram of the site is formed on the same principle as the previous type, but allows you to quickly move from the deep section to the first levels of the resource.
Website structure is important for SEO promotion. It plays the role of a technical tool in site optimization in browser search engines. The simpler the site structure, the higher its position in the search engine rankings. It provides constant targeted traffic to solve the company's business problems. Search engines consider the structure of the website when indexing it. With proper design, the robot performs faster scanning and spends fewer resources. It allows you to get into the TOP indexing of the search engine in the shortest possible time.
The competent SEO structure of the site is an integral factor in the success of search engine optimization. It is directly proportional to the promotion effectiveness and improves search engine rankings among similar resources.
Designing the site structure takes place in several stages:
When designing a site, you must first determine the type of its structure, which will depend on the activities, goals, and consumer audience of the company/brand/business/enterprise.
1 Site structure analysis and construction of the semantic core to form certain principles on which specialists will create categories and sections of the resource and optimize the site for search engines. Experts highlight the necessary logic of grouping goods/services and select helpful headings for blogging.2 Building a hierarchical structure, categories with the best nesting indicators, developing sections of the resource and its design, and setting up integration to improve the quality of site usability and better interaction with databases.
3 Creating a URL structure with key phrases corresponding to the previously created hierarchy.
4 Site layout, setting up its navigation in CSS/HTML.
5 Optimize links within the resource and adjust relinking to facilitate user orientation when navigating the landing page and create intuitive navigation.
6 Selection of relevant content, filling the site and testing it, thorough resource analysis for significant savings of effort and time.
A simple three-click rule will help develop the site structure: the user should be able to get any information in no more than three mouse clicks. Sections should not be too deep: no more than three pages in one category. This accessible structure, consisting of the main page and two levels of nesting, will allow the user to quickly find the necessary information on the resource and simplify its analysis by search engines.
How to see the structure of the page
It is helpful to look at an example of the site architecture of competitors or a respected resource that is in demand and popular in its segment at the stage of planning and modeling the structure of the future site. It allows you to analyze, gather the necessary data and make conclusions for further action, avoid common mistakes, and use the findings wisely.
You can manually check the resource structure description. To begin, visually analyze the site as an average user: evaluate the convenience of navigation panels, ease of menu construction, clarity, and accessibility of all elements located on the pages. Pay attention to the URLs of the pages. It will help determine the presence of a hierarchical system in the site structure.
You can see the site structure online using various programs and services. Such online tools analyze resource architecture based on search engine-indexed pages and model an approximate site structure for visually assessing the most voluminous sections.
