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• General Web Topics and Tools
  • Organizing Your Web Site
    • Considering Your Audiences
    • Gathering Your Content
    • Dividing Up Your Content
    • Labeling Your Content
  • Writing for the Web
  • Using Web Graphics and Photos
  • Ensuring Accessibility
  • Web Tools, Technology and UVM Support
  • Glossary of Web Terms
  • Helpful Links for Web Developers
  • Recommended Books for Web Developers

Introduction: Organizing Your Web Site

"The first thing you'll need to do is dumb yourself down:
your own in-depth knowledge of your site
can make it difficult to understand a visitor's perspective."

— Jennifer Fleming, Web Navigation: Designing the User Experience

Before you start wondering about which graphics to use on your Web site or how to design it, you first should consider ...

your content and how to organize it.

Whether you plan to rebuild an existing Web site or start from scratch, you need to think about your site's information architecture and navigation before you start creating pages.

This section will introduce you to:

• Managing a large amount of information on a Web site.
• Dividing content into easy-to-understand categories.
• Transferring print documents to the Web.
• Organizing for the Web (versus print).
• Thinking like a user.
• Labeling content.
• Reaching various audiences.

Last modified August 22 2003 04:07 PM