Web Design & Development

Content Chunking Defined

Organization of your Site

The organization of your information is critical when it comes to navigation and usability of your site. Users need to be able to find what they are looking for. Creating the structure of a site can be one of the greatest challenges to a Web development project. Here are some basic steps you can follow that may be helpful:

Determine at a very general what your content should be based on your goals and objectives

Brainstorm a list of content items you want on your site. Don't worry about organizing them yet. Just come up with a few words to describe each item.

Create logical units, or "buckets" for your content. These should be very broad.
Sample: "finance", "marketing", "company information", "products and services", etc.

Try to put each of your content items from step 2 into a bucket from step 3. If you can't then decide if you need another "bucket" or if the content is not truly applicable.

You will notice that some stuff might fit into more than one bucket. Try to put it in the area where it is most applicable.

Now identify relations between the "buckets" and content within each bucket. What will you need to tie together somehow?

Build a site that closely follows your information structure

Test and revise

What you want to try to do is avoid having redundant information in many places. This becomes a nightmare to maintain and often confuses the users since where ever they go they stumble upon stuff they have seen before somewhere else.

Content Chunking

Now that you have your content organized into "buckets" or clumps we need to spend a few moments talking about how users will access this information on the Web. A key factor to bear in mind is that the user will not necessarily come from any particular page or location. This means each page (and piece of content) you make therefore must be able to stand on its own to some degree.

Next it is important to remember that most users of the Web are inclined to "skim" the content of your page rather than read it. If when they "skim" it they find it useful they may (or may not) then spend more time reading segments of interest to them. For you this means it must be very clear to the user what the page content is about and you must be concise and brief when displaying your content.