Planning a Website

How Many Pages will you have

Before you start designing a website, it is a good idea to decide roughly how many pages you expect to include.  One way to do this is to draw a map in the form of a tree diagram so you can understand where each page would fit into your website.  This will help you to come up with a design that is easy to navigate.

Parent Pages

Parent pages are the main pages on your website.  In the map example above, the yellow pages are all parent pages.  They stand alone and may have 'children' linked to them. Children Pages

Children pages are subpages of another page.  They must have a parent.  In the map example above the blue pages are children pages. You can also have child pages off other child pages as illustrated by ‘Product 1’ leading to ‘Product 3 & 4’ in the diagram above. Types of Navigation

Every website needs some form or navigation.  Navigation menus can be both horizontal, like this website, or vertical, much like our sub-navigation.  Horizontal navigation can typically only lead to 5 or 6 pages because there is a limit to the width of the page.  Vertical navigations are not usually limited in this way and can contain many more pages.  However, they may appear too busy to the viewer or if there are too many pages then half the navigation is hidden unless the viewer scrolls down.

You can have nested subpages in your navigation, such as a drop down menu that appears when you hover your mouse cursor over a main page name.  You can also have a separate navigation bar for subpages that only appears when you click through to one of the main parent pages.  That would be similar to the navigation on this website.

You can do a lot with navigation so be creative with it.  We suggest looking at a range of websites you like and decide which style of navigation suites your needs best.