Have you considered learning how to organize your website in order to give it a more professional look?
Small business owners routinely cite being overwhelmed with getting new clients and customer service as barriers to working on elevating their websites to a professional standard.
Some say they have tried to get things right, but they are still getting poor results, others have tried hiring an agency for a new site for search engine optimization with nothing to show for it. For these reasons, many have given up. So, if you are one of those who has abandoned hope or still struggle with poor results there is good news: you are probably doing the right things, but in the wrong way.
Most business owners act on their instincts. Making a plan to connect with potential customers at a trade show or industry event is a great example. Salespeople know that they need different talking points and offers for different target audiences.
The same is true with your website! This approach to a website’s content and information structure tells a lot. It determines the types of audiences your homepage will attract and retain, the volume of clients and customers it will generate, and the overall success rate of your marketing.
In this article, you will learn A-Z of how to organize your website so that Google indexes and ranks your website highly in the search results. This is the knowledge you need to fully understand the true potential of your website and what needs to be done whenever anything goes wrong.
Organize Your Website With Different Styles
Before we proceed into the main details, it is important to get familiar with some basic things about website organizational structure, stylings, and standards. Style sheets can be helpful and useful in getting familiar with these basics. A style sheet is a set of rules that govern most design elements during the web development process.
You will need a style sheet when you want to do things like the formatting of text. These include text alignment, color format, text weight, and font, etc. Other activities that fall within this context are things like the positioning of web-elements such as text boxes and images.
It is very common among web developers to employ dynamically-generated style sheets in the course of developing their site as against others that would just use a hard-coded approach. Either way, they serve the same purpose.
Information Structure
Think of the type of impression your site will make to your users, then think of the possible relevant content you would have wanted to see as a visitor to make your user experience awesome. While most of your visitors may not have the time to give you the needed feedback, what you see from a visitor’s mindset is likely what most of the real visitors are seeing. So, get into action and address the shortcomings!
Work to make your user experience as easy as possible. A simple theory about information architecture is that you organize your website content in the main navigation bar and display the pages you have based on the way your users want to see in order of importance.
Two major types of organization schemes are subjective organization scheme and exact organization scheme. You are the one to determine which one your website needs.
Subjective Organization Scheme
This is the type of organization that takes information and places it into different categories, which are defined specifically by an organization or a particular field. Although some content developers would complain that this subjective organization approach is difficult if they are to be designed from the start, I would, however, encourage you to take the leap if that is what your site needs to get visitors glued.
All you need to really get into it is to keep doing it. With time, you will get extremely comfortable with it. Once you feel comfortable with it, you can draft a user mental model. It will amaze you how proficient you will be at arranging content to reach users in the most effective ways.
The subjective organization scheme draws connections and relationships between different pieces of information and your website’s contents. Take a look at these few examples and see how you can integrate them into your approach:
- You can use topic schemes to arrange content based on subject matter. These are some of the subjective organization schemes. These types of schemes are very useful when a user is looking for specific topics and knows what keywords they need to get to that information. Organizing properly, using this approach will make your content very easy to find.
- Metaphor schemes are also another vital angle to subjective organization schemes. Whenever you have any need to organize your content in a manner that makes them connect to similar content, metaphor schemes are exactly the approach you need. These sets of schemes are often used in interface design including trash, folders, and other locations.
- You can also use audience schemes to organize your content on the website based on the type of audience that the said contents are directed to.
- Another subjective organization scheme that can be very useful in arranging your content is task schemes. You can use them to arrange your content based on needs, actions, procedures, or questions, which visitors will consider in the course of searching for specific keywords.
Exact Organization Schemes
This is the approach needed when you want to divide content or information into different sections that are mutually exclusive. Like subject organization schemes, there are also different types of exact organization schemes that you can use to formalize your organization style. They are as follows:
- One of the commonly used exact organization schemes is the alphabetical scheme. You can use the alphabetical scheme to organize your contents in alphabetical order. This is one of the simplest schemes to use for both web designer/business owner and consumer alike.
- Chronological schemes are also useful in this context. These are the type of schemes that you can use to organize your contents by date.
- You can also use geographical schemes to organize content based on places and locations. This also qualifies as one of the most used exact organization schemes.
Conclusion
Organizing and updating your website’s layout can bring a refresh to your business as a whole and can really enhance user experience. There are plenty of other factors that go into website organization and performance, we recommend checking out information on those factors here.
