Web Site Structure

What is a web site?

	Universal Resource Locator (URL) for the Web server, e.g. the Welcome or Home page
	Tags containing HREF attributes (links) that pointing to other pages
	HREF attributes are found in tags such as A, MAP, etc.
	Links are uni-directional (obvious but important)
	Links can have four kinds of destinations: location in the same document document on the same web site (relative URL) document on another WWW site (absolute URL) a program that results in a web page (CGI script)
	Destination URLs may or may not include ANCHOR name
	CGI scripts can generate pages "on the fly" -- these pages only exist when they are asked for, they are the "output" of programs
	Links can be coded into non-HTML formats: Javascript, VBscript, PDF, ShockWave , Flash , Java applets, etc.
	The URL for a single frameset may represent many combinations of HTML documents within that frameset
	There is no HTML convention to distinguish global navigation structures: header/footer/sidebars that contain links to major sections of a site

Navigation problems on a World Wide Web site

Conklin's original problem statement (circa 1987):

	disorientation: the tendency to lose one's sense of location and direction in a nonlinear environment
	cognitive overhead: the additional effort and concentration necessary to maintain several tasks or trails at one time

To this we can add:

	absence of physical context: the reader only sees one page at a time
	increased need for graphical context cues: the reader's idea of what the web site contains must be presented and reinforced on each page
	lack of control over the "rhetoric of arrival"*: the reader can arrive at any page by a variety of methods: link from within the site link from outside the site link created from a text search We cannot rely on the BACK button *see George P. Landow, Hypertext: The Convergence of Critical Theory and Technology, Johns Hopkins University Press.

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