Web Sites and College Campuses
Saturday, February 23rd, 2008Years ago, back when I was a college textbook rep, a professor told me that when new college campuses are built the designers don’t put in all the sidewalks right away. They wait to see where the students wear a path in the grass and then build them there. You can use this same idea when you build a big, database-driven web site. You create stable URLs for all of your site pages and then build rudimentary navigation and then see how your users actually navigate, or try to navigate, your site. Once you’ve got a feel for how folks actually want to use your site, then you can go back and tailor your navigation to their needs.
I’m trying this with my new massage education directory, Bodywork U. Sure, there’s probably a more elegant and proactive way to do this, but 1) users will always do what they want anyway, so why try to outguess them, and 2) I don’t have the budget to hire a hot-shot website navigation expert.