Some Navigation options

There are generally 2 ways to organize navigation – By Audience or By Program. We are actually going to recommend a third, hybrid-style, of navigation.

Option One:  By Audience

• Main links are organized by the people who would use them
• Examples are Prospective Students, Current Students, Alumni, etc
• Problem is that there is a lot of overlap and some people go into multiple categories
• There are some items that are separate such as facilities

Option Two:  By Program

• Main links are organized by Program
• Examples are Undergraduate, Graduate, Doctoral
• Problem is having each area have items for each audience
• There is a need to have a message per audience

Option Three: A Hybrid

• This is what we are recommending
• We can have our general marketing message per audience
• We can have tools specific to audience members in their area
• We can have general program descriptions
• We can pull out the most used categories such as Courses and Advising
• It is easy to showcase specialty areas like Physics on the Road or Solar Car.

Visual Diagrams

If you are unable to view the images an HTML version of the visio storyboard is provided.

Note: This chart was created using a product called Visio which allows boxes to be moved around much like Post-It notes. The benefit of using this tool is that it will generate the files and folders for you once the storyboard has been approved thereby helping to set up the initial structure of your site.