subject: Find Out The Best Structure For Your Website [print this page] Website architecture is very critical for it affects how your visitors view and interact with your site and it determines the ranking for your site in search engines as well. Statistics show that if your visitors cannot find what they are looking for in three clicks, they will move on to other sites instantly. If your website is not built properly, you will lose traffic and rank low on search engines.
The content or the information embedded in your website should be accessible from the root folder of your site. You can categorize your topics into folders for easy finding. For example, if your topic is website design, your second tier could be about website building, maintenance and marketing. There could be a 3rd tier, 4th tier and so on and so forth if it seems necessary.
For large websites, the content should not be more than three clicks away or else the visitors of the site will lose interest. If you have a lot of things on your site, it would be best to create a site map to be able to guide your visitors properly. The site map should be easily accessible from the home page so that the visitors and the search engine can index your site more easily.
Good site architecture includes subcategorizing topics and not just filing it all in one root folder. For all articles, you should create a folder marked as ARTICLES. For all CSS categories, file it all on the CSS folder, and so on and so forth.
If your website comes up to a hundred pages, it would be very difficult to edit it if you do not incorporate in your site architecture the server-side includes or SSI. With SSI, you will be able to change the date of the site in just one editing instead of doing it over all the web pages.
Site architecture using content management systems like Wordpress and Joomla are also an ideal situation. These systems will let you separate your design from your contents. You can maintain your site easily this way without you having to go on a crash course regarding HTML.
