Site Structure

If you are lucky enough to start with a clean slate to build your own site, the most important thing you can do is Plan Before You Build.

This isn't about you!

Your site needs to be about your visitors, not about making your department look good (though that can be a very nice side effect!)

Think about your site in terms of how you make information available to people. At the highest level, your site's structure should offer your visitors logical (and maybe multiple) paths through your site content.

Cascade CMS uses the way you sort out your folders and pages to help you build the structure of your site and its navigation (the "tabs" that run down the side of your pages). In order to make the most of this function, you should understand how to use the "Site Content" view, folders and other site assets.

Before you begin

Before building or reorganizing a site inside Cascade CMS you may want to consider the following strategies:

• List all the content you want to make available to your site visitors.
• Try to identify the audience or audiences you are trying to help with your web site.
• List all the content you think your audiences want to find.
• Sort all the possible content into groups by topic and/or by audience. Think of words to group content under and think of those words as the "tabs" or navigational items someone would click to reveal the information.
• Put yourself in your visitors' shoes. What are they looking for? How might they approach their search for information and why?
• Think of words your target audience would use, especially if they may not be the words you use.
• Some information may seem to belong to more than one group. That may be true and the web can help you associate the same information with different topics or different audiences. 

Once you come up with a basic list of items for your navigation, you can begin to build your site in Cascade CMS. Don't worry! Your initial sense of what you want may change as you build your site and the Cascade CMS will allow you to easily tweak your site structure as your site and your understanding grows.