I made this video to help get an overall view of the work involved in migrating our site to a new structure. The video shows our full website structure printed onto 6 pages of A4 paper and stuck to my office wall.
It is SO big I actually had to stand on a chair then hop off half way though filming.
Note: The areas marked with the red line are our main services and make up the bulk of the site the area marked in blue near the bottom is corporate and business information.
Why did I do this?
In a word, perspective. You see I’ve bragged for a long time that we had a LOT of pages on our site, its one of the reasons I advocate the use of the CMS Tree Page View WordPress plugin for navigating large hierarchical sites like ours, without it I’d be lost.
Printing out every section and every page is a great way to see this for real right in front of your eyes. It makes the mass of content tangible and allows you to stand and stare and think and discuss the way this structure came about. Was it intentional? Is it right? Can we make it better? All great questions like this are FAR easier to answer and comprehend when you have something as impressive as this to physically look at and play with.
What next?
I’ve known for a while that this structure is wrong so it will change significantly in the new version of our site. All the content will of course remain but be shifted to new sections or consolidated into more intelligent areas.
Ultimately this venture has proved incredibly useful. Without it I don’t think that any of the team working on the new site would have been able to grasp the true scale of the job in hand.
