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We can now sketch out some new structures to test. Let’s take a look at the most common ways sites are organized, and some common tactics that can help us create our own trees.

When you start creating a site tree, you will usually play with various kinds of top-level groups, probably trying some of the variations described above.

A very common tactic is to combine some of these schemes as first- and second-level headings. For example, you may use audiences as your primary navigation, then activities within each of the audience sections:

•  diagram of audience>activity tree

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You may then decide to try replacing activities with, say, geography:

•  diagram of audience>geography tree

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Another common tactic is to flip the primary and secondary navigation, to see if it fits the content better.

For example, the audience/activity tree that we tried earlier…

•  diagram of audience>activity tree

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…could be flipped to become an activity>audience tree:

•  diagram of activity>audience tree

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We may do the flip, think about it, and decide that it won’t work for our purposes (perhaps the content doesn’t fit as well, or we’re sure that it will be confusing for users).

But, if it looks reasonable, and we’re not sure how well it will work with users, it’s probably worth testing both versions in side-by-side tree tests.

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