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If content is king when it comes to websites, then structure must come in a close second. You could have the best content you could possibly offer, but if it isn’t structured in just the right way you could find that while your hit counter is telling you you’re getting plenty of visitors, the majority of them aren’t actually hanging around for very long.

One good way of making sure you have a good structure is to plan it out on a huge sheet of paper before you try and put your website together (or revamp your existing one, if that is what you are planning on doing). This enables you to scribble notes, cross things out, and generally experiment with what information works well in which area of the website.

Some people get confused with their structure because they will have a piece of information which could equally well belong on two different pages. In this case you could choose the best place for it to go, and then link to that page from the other page that seems to be a good bet for it too. Internal linking between different pages of a website is a good idea anyway, because it will encourage the search engine spiders to explore and find other areas of your site to be found in their search results.

Generally speaking, the bigger a website is the harder it can become to get the structure right. That’s why it can help enormously to do some research by looking at other websites you like yourself which are of a similar size to the one you want to do. Look at how they have broken everything up into sections, and how those may be subdivided into sub-sections to make life easier for every visitor.

You can also learn a lot from those websites that clearly get it wrong and are very confusing to navigate. By writing down what does work and what doesn’t you can get your own website positioned nicely in the middle, with a structure that works and a hit counter that keeps on rising as a result.

The main thing to remember is that even if you are going to have sub-sections on your website (probably because you have a lot to fit in), you should make sure that the main structure is clearly visible on the home page. If visitors find it hard to figure out where things are or how to access them, they won’t hang around for very long.

Incidentally if you do opt to have lots of different pages within a single section, it can work well to have a drop down menu which lists all the different options available within it when someone clicks on it to indicate they have an interest in that section. If you can make life easier for your visitors in any way, then you are better off doing it.

In short, make sure your structure is given the attention it needs – otherwise your website could fail miserably.