How to best organize a site with a ton of articles

SucceedSocially · 01-20-2009, 11:23 AM

My site has about 75 articles on it, all about a pretty focused topic.

Recently I've heard that some new readers are getting overwhelmed by the amount of content I have up. They seem to think the information is good, but there's so much of it they feel they don't know where to start, or that they had no idea the topic could be as detailed.

At the moment the articles are all listed on one main index page, categorized by topic.

Any ideas about how to best organize the site are welcome.

The index page in question is: succeedsocially.com

Jasber · 01-22-2009, 10:50 PM

I'd suggest looking into tags and categories. Something shorter that is easier to scan. Perhaps even a tag cloud if it makes sense for your site. Right now it is a little overwhelming scanning through all of the articles.

nancy123 · 01-23-2009, 12:40 AM

I would suggest you to add categories on the index page make different categories page so that it is easy to locate and look quite pretty also.

Mick Shaw · 02-22-2009, 11:58 PM

Too much info will distract your visitors, group them into sub-pages. Think about how some good books contents pages are laid out, for example a Chapter heading then sub-titles under the heading might be useful for your visitors.
Best of luck.

Jenie0109 · 02-23-2009, 03:33 AM

One thing I could think of is to sort them.

SiteBetter · 03-18-2009, 07:02 AM

Your site is really good and informative. It reminds me a bot like Steve Pavlina's website

First, I would get rid of the red (or orange). It's not a fun color to look at on screen. I would suggest you make the links blue. I would space them out more. They are too jammed to together.

jacksun0426 · 03-19-2009, 05:24 PM

Define some "Start here" articles, after all the users are coming to your site for direction. These articles could be basic, or a custom article expanding on the reason your site exists and what they will find there. Then maybe a link for how to use the site: and outline your content there which should match your navigation links to defined article groupings and refer to your tag words.
This should help users understand your site, and point them in the correct direction.

Wayne

t-wins · 04-04-2009, 09:54 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Mick Shaw

Too much info will distract your visitors, group them into sub-pages. Think about how some good books contents pages are laid out, for example a Chapter heading then sub-titles under the heading might be useful for your visitors.
Best of luck.

I agree. The first question I would ask is whether you really need that many articles. If you can reduce the number of articles, you can reduce the task of organizing them. There must be some room to make this whole thing simpler, then you can tag or sub-catagorize your articles.

camp185 · 04-09-2009, 03:24 PM

Card sorting. http://www.bestwebimage.com/usabilit.../card-sorting/

roje0913 · 04-09-2009, 06:33 PM

I would say put them in a database and then you can play with any number of ways to sort them with minimal coding.

Jul · 05-04-2009, 07:43 AM

SucceedSocially,

I like your original idea of presenting all the articles on the same page. I would recommend to show one article per category on the homepage, about 1 to 2 paragraphs of each, with a link to read more. But not more than ~10 articles at a time. Once a visitor clicked that link and got onto the internal page showing the entire article, present more "related/recommended" articles at the side navigation bar. I suggest having less categories by grouping more articles into same category.

I would not recommend having categories as a menu navigation bar.

A tag cloud is always a nice way to show your visitors popular articles.

Still, you better keep the list of all articles under the name "index" or "archives" (but not as a home page!), so your visitors could see them all at a glance if they wish.

And, of course, the search option is more than welcome with such quantity of quality content.

blazintech · 05-04-2009, 09:53 AM

How about making it into a directory type... but dont forget to also use categories... then people can also add tags in it to make it easier to find.

Jul · 05-04-2009, 01:00 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Jul

I would recommend to show one article per category on the homepage, about 1 to 2 paragraphs of each, with a link to read more. But not more than ~10 articles at a time. Once a visitor clicked that link and got onto the internal page showing the entire article, present more "related/recommended" articles at the side navigation bar. I suggest having less categories by grouping more articles into same category.

I now realize that the main idea of my suggestion isn't as clear, as I would like it be. The main goal of the change that I suggested is creating a feeling of small website at first glance, and than, while the visitors are browsing the website, suggest them more related articles. This sort of "conceptual" navigation would help keeping visitors "focused" and "in control" of what they're doing.

Good luck!

Netspider · 05-11-2009, 08:25 PM

You have a good domain. For "succeed socially" the Google's search box is currently showing "6,800,000 results".

Your meta name (keywords) "social skills, shyness, cool, meet women, attract women, make friends, social life, how to be cooler, lonely, loneliness".

I suggest you (1) include "succeed socially" to continue staying #1 for the keyword, (2) have "Featured Article of the Week" to get better repeat traffic, and (3) give Freebies.

For "Freebies" you can give away free ebooks with your links.

somanweb · 05-12-2009, 08:29 AM

Hi ,

You can use Content Management system ( CMS ) like Joomla or Drupal.

It will be easy to organize the content and archive the contents.

Soman

stbalaji2u · 09-21-2009, 09:04 PM

As you have all setup your site and it already indexed by search engines i wont suggest you to use a CMS since it will drastically affect your seo.

IMHO the best way is to create a life cycle like Diagram (Visually Appelaing based on your design etiquettes) grasp the visitors attention by showing it in center with about 60 to 80% of browser windows,the life cycle diagram can be some thing like,,

"why you are here"(About The Site) - > "I want to improve-Show me how" (The Process of Improving)->Meet people and make friend-> etc etc.

This will improve readablity and also the click through rate, this is my personal opinion see how it works. Good Luck

somanweb · 09-22-2009, 01:26 AM

Hi,

We can customize the url in CMS , as per the old url or we can do permanently 301 redirect from old urls to new urls.

Soman

stbalaji2u · 09-22-2009, 06:09 AM

You can do both of them, for customizing the urls in CMS you first need to setup a proper tree like structure to get the birds eye view about the URL management

My opinion is if you have less pages in your old url strcture do 301 redirects if its high then do a planned approach on changing it via cms. it is purely subjective.