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Updated: August 19th, 2009
Large websites, such as those for shopping, travel and news, can have a huge number of sections to them. You may have gained a regular follower by writing interesting articles and they are now searching for a niche topic; you may have sold an item to a customer looking for support or a visitor might be looking at the other services you offer. In each of these situations and many others, users are looking for content that may be hidden in a subsection within the depths of your site and it is your challenge to ensure they can find what they want.
Your visitors may not be entirely sure what they are looking for. They may remember some keywords of an article, but not the title; they may have a very specific technical query that they need the answer to and they may be desperate for answers.
How can we arrange our site to cater for lost users and what extra features can we provide? If the user has to turn to Google search in order to find something on your site, then we can consider the design a failure.
Search
A search box should be a simple and effective way for a user to search through all of your articles and content and have the results prioritised in a meaningful way. A simple pattern match with a timeline of results is not sufficient to solving this goal.
Large websites should feature a decent search that can prioritise results by their relevance.
Writing a good search box isn’t easy but luckily software such as WordPress comes with an excellent search that will work perfectly for you. If you are writing a site from scratch, you can look for open source solutions or you can even out-source this problem to Google and integrate one of their search fields.
The Google option has the drawback that it only indexes the public facing content of your website, as defined by where its spider can visit. You won’t be able to use special database variables to influence your search results, prioritising important articles or those by a specific author. In the end, it depends on what you need.
The search box should always be in the top-right of every page on your site, with no exceptions, so they can use it whenever they get lost. The worst case scenario is when your user is searching for the search page!
Sensible sections
For users that have a general idea of what they want, but not a specific article in mind, having clear sections will help guide them to the page they want.
Split your site into broad and clear sections to ease navigation.
For example, a travel website could split its pages into four distinct areas: flight booking, flight information, user accounts and customer service. These four categories have little or no overlap and the names give a clear indication of what that section is for. A user can quickly decipher the meanings of each section and decide on the one they want to browse.
Repeat this process on each of the categories, building a tree hierarchy that covers all of your content.
Site maps
In the real world, when you get lost, you might reach for a map, inspiring the site maps we use today on large websites. In truth, they aren’t really maps, they provide an index to your Web content, a screenful of links that your visitors can browse.
Large websites should feature a site map containing a link to every section and subsection.
Site maps are good because a user who visits one is already commited to finding something on your website. They are focused on the task, allowing you to fill the page with links to everything that they might possibly want to visit. This doesn’t mean you should list every article you’re ever written but you could list every category and every section of content you have.
You can of course style this area with bold headings and a tabular layout (not with the <table> tag!) to help the user navigate the material, use the sensible sections described above to segregate our links in a friendly manner.