Summersault Blog

When you redevelop a website’s content structure (which often happens when you redevelop it’s graphical appearance), it’s pretty common for directories and files to get renamed, chunks of content to get moved around, and in general, for the site to become quickly unfamiliar to those who had learned their way around it.

If your site is fairly small, this isn’t a big problem - someone can just start from the beginning and get where they’re going fairly easily. But if your site has lots of content, it can be very jarring to have to go find all of that content again. What’s even more noteworthy is that if there are lots of people linking to your site or if you’ve achieved a certain standing in search engine results, rearranging all of your content structure can have a negative impact on how people find and use your site.

So, here are six tips for any time when you make significant changes to the content structure of a non-trivially sized website:

1. Make sure you’re designing for scalability and longevity. if you’re going to go through the hassle of restructuring your content, then do it in a way that’s going to last a long time. Think about any and all imaginable (or even unimaginable) future content you might want to add, and make sure there’s a plan for where it will go. If you have to add a new navigation section every time you publish a new page, you’re probably hurting yourself and your users.
    
2. When you launch your new site, put a notice about that fact somewhere obvious on the front page. You should announce major changes so that A) people can appreciate them, and B) users will give you a little leeway in their use of the site, knowing that it’s brand new.
    
3. Use redirects. Redirects are configuration entries that can be set up through your hosting company to automatically take a user requesting old location A to new location B. Say, for example, your old site had a page called “www.example.com/contact.html” and on your new site it’s at “www.example.com/about/contact-us.html” With a redirect, anyone accessing “/contact.html” will automatically arrive at “/about/contact-us.html”. This is essential to do for the most frequently visited or highly visible parts of your old site!
    
4. Make sure you setup an informative “Not Found” 404 page. When someone visits a page that is no longer there, they should get a message that lets them know about your recent content restructuring, offers them any helpful notes about where things can be found, and as a last resort, points them to the front page of your site and/or a search tool that they can use to get where they were headed. You may need to work with your website hosting company to put this into effect.
    
5. Keep your incoming linkers up to date. This can take a little more effort, but one thing you want to make sure to do is keep the sites that send you incoming links up to date. If you know of someone who is linking to you (either anecdotally or through the use of website usage statistics), send them a brief e-mail noting the change, and on what page of their site they need to make an update. If your site has a large number of incoming links, consider establishing a transition page as a part of your redirect system, that not only takes users to the correct new page, but also informs them of your changeover and asks them to update the source link they’re coming from.
    
6. Review your website usage statistics. You should really do this before and after your content restructuring, to make sure you understand how people are navigating through your site, and what pitfalls or dead ends they might encounter. A good website will probably need to go through several rounds of navigation and content structure revisions, based on real world usage data, before it can be considered “stable.” Good site development blueprinting can be an important part of this.
    

I hope you’ve found these tips helpful. If you have other suggestions to add from your experiences in restructuring your site content, feel free to post them here.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 4th, 2006 at 12:00 pm and is filed under Sysadmin / Hosting, Website Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.