Organizing your content
Great website navigation starts with organizing content correctly. Content should be categorized into mutually exclusive sections and labeled accurately. There are reasons for standard section naming like "Products," "Community," and "About Us." Users know what to expect in these areas. The general rule of thumb when naming sections and pages is to be familiar and specific. Research other sites in your industry and follow proven architecture organization and classification. If you want to be different, have a testing mechanism in place to see if your users are embracing your genius or getting frustrated by your curveball.
Too deep versus too shallow
When organizing your architecture, strive for a site that doesn't have too many top-level sections, but also doesn't have content that is too many clicks away. Limit main section navigation links to seven or eight, and keep your most detailed content within four clicks.
Be exclusive
One way to keep your navigation from being too shallow or too deep is to borrow a concept from newspapers. If your homepage is a front page, grouped sections are the equivalent to the main sections of your site. Newspapers keep the politics articles in the world section and the football stories in the sports section. However, sometimes content wants to live in more than one section. In these instances, root the content in the most obvious section and reference it from the other. Make sure users know they are moving laterally across sections rather than down deeper within a section.
Business perspective vs. user perspective
Sometimes where you want users to go isn't where users want to end up. Good information architecture, prioritized page layout, strong calls-to-actions, and consistent treatment of navigation will help funnel users to the information you want them to see. Make sure content goes somewhere, and avoid dead ends.
Successful business-centric sites focus on business goals. Sites that accomplish both business and user goals are often the most successful. Find that balance by encouraging user interactions. Lead users looking for articles to sign up for newsletters or users looking for locations to provide their ZIP code. Ask visitors to share with friends, follow you on Twitter, or add that second pair of socks to their shopping cart.
Site mapping vs. flowcharting
Site maps show the structure of the site and indicate where content lives. When mapping a new site, we find a large wall and arrange page names with sticky notes. When finished, we group content into main sections and re-organize the sticky notes until mutual exclusivity and optimal content "depth" has been achieved.
Once the structure is complete, we start to look at how we expect traffic to flow through the site. Flowcharting moves users across sections and funnels them to pages we want them to visit. We leverage content, calls-to-action, and "marketing" columns to suggest the next action users should take. Obvious trigger elements like submit buttons, add-to-cart links, and send-to-friend tabs fulfill on our preset metrics and ultimately prove the site's success. Finally, make sure you have a web analytics package in place to measure your decisions. Test and revise regularly to optimize your organization, naming and flow success.
