How To Develop A Page Hierarchy System

When using a website builder, most people focus on just the website itself. This is fine, but there is something you may be passing over that can make a huge difference for your site. How your site is organized can be the difference between an average site and a fantastic one.

While most might think that this involves a lot of work and effort, it is actually very simple. Let us show you how to improve the appeal and use of your website by developing a hierarchy.

Planning Makes Perfect

Before you start putting pages together and placing links to them all over the place, take time to plan out how you want your site to work. Develop an idea of how your website should flow, what the menu should look like, and where pages should be placed. Doing this allows you to physically see the layout of your site and where some categories or menu options may be too heavy, or too light.

Unsure how to plan it out? Not a problem, we have you covered for that too.

Yin and Yang

Not only in life, but in a website as well, balance is key. What we mean is that your site needs to be balanced or symmetrical. When laying out your website, look at how it is stacking up.

Put your logo or menu button in the middle (more on this later), and place an equal amount of categories on each side. If you don’t have an even amount, that’s ok, use the length of the category names as a determining factor.

For example, if you have one category name that is longer in length, put that on the less side. Although you don’t have an equal amount on each side, it will still look balanced. Once you have this set up, start putting in the pages that belong to each category. If you notice that you are getting heavy on one of the categories, look at the pages themselves. Can you combine some of them? What about changing the page to fit into another category?

As you do this you’ll see the website balancing itself. This makes for a better user experience.

Front and Center

We mentioned that you should put your logo or menu button in the middle when figuring out the balance of your site, and here’s why. Your menu is the veins of your website. Clicking on the menu brings you to every other part of your website. Having this at the top of your site and right in the middle brings more attention to it.

While your logo should be above your menu, it should still be center. When you go to a website, the first place you look is top-center. Most websites have the starting blocks here to find more information, and yours should be no different.

Don’t Be Sluggish

Have you noticed when you click on a different page of a website there is a “/ ” followed by words? This is known as the URL slug. Utilizing this can help you with both SEO and making your site easier to use and remember. Each page has a URL slug and if you take the time and are using a good website builder, you can customize each one – further balancing your website. This is a more intensive option but definitely makes a difference in site appeal.

A Website Builder Makes It Easier

We’ve mentioned having a good website builder a couple of times, and for good reason. When building a website, you want to have access to and control of a lot of different aspects. If you are using one of the drag and drop types of site builders, chances are you will have limited features.

This is why we build the whole suite of BoldGrid plugins. Check it out for more information, and for how you can fully explore creating a beautiful website with a balanced hierarchy.