Web Site Design and Setup - Site Layout

Since the human brain can only digest so much information in a single space before it becomes overwhelmed, and since large Web pages can take an impossibly long time to load, Web sites are intricately organized as a series of pages—often stretching into the hundreds—that interconnect in ways that have been thoroughly thought out by the designer to most accurately reflect the site's content and make the site as user-friendly as possible. A general rule of thumb holds that smaller, easily differentiated units of information are easier for users to sift through and use than are large, undifferentiated pieces. Through the late 1990s and early 2000s, e-commerce Web sites were shortened to limit the amount of scrolling a user had to do on a given page. Ideally, sites are organized so that all the information is presented to customers without their having to do anything. Obviously, this was not always possible, but design analysts generally agreed that the less a user has to hunt around to find what he or she wants, the more likely a purchase will result.

According to the Web Style Guide: Basic Design Principles for Creating Web Sites by Patrick J. Lynch and Sarah Horton, the organizational schemes of Web sites are ideally designed to limit the number of variables that the user must keep in short-term memory by way of intelligent site layout and a combination of textual content, graphic design, and layout schemes organized to complement the Web site's purpose—whether that purpose is to sell products, convey information, or provide tools by which users can find the information they want. "Most Web sites contain reference information that people seek in small units," Lynch and Horton wrote. "Users rarely read long contiguous passages of text from computer screens, and most people who are seeking a specific piece of information will be annoyed to have to scan long blocks of text to find what they are after."

Web sites are typically laid out in hierarchical organization schemes, and guide users through the site via a navigation path. That is, it points users toward various broad sectors of the site from the home page, and with each click the user gets closer to the precise information they want. The trick in devising this organization scheme is to make it obvious to the user without necessarily calling attention to itself. All things being equal, designers generally want to create navigation paths that allow users to get the information they want in as few clicks as possible while still maintaining a clear overall sense of logical navigation. A clear navigation path ensures that, no matter where users are on a site and no matter how many clicks from the home page they are, they still have a clear sense of where they are on the site, particularly in relation to the home page and the major subsections.