Center for Internet Marketing
Research & Education

Exponent of Internet Marketing Education Since 1999

How does a site containing thousands of pages of content get users to the content they seek quickly? There are many different strategies for organizing content on sites and we recently took a hard look at five of them.

We've been examining several e-commerce sites to see how they handled the problem of categorizing large numbers of products. We were interested in seeing if the different designers came up with different methods and which methods were most effective.

Our recent apparel and home goods study turned out to be a good place to start. Here we looked at thirteen different sites, each with a similar product set.

Every site had some similar characteristics. First, they divided the content into just a few top-level categories, such as "Women", "Men", and "For the Home".

(Apparel is one of the few content types that lends itself to such easy organization. Sites containing content such as office supplies or support problems probably have to adopt different top-level solutions, such as what Staples [http://www.staples.com] has done.)

Also, they had similar pages that displayed pictures of all the items within a given category. We call these pages product galleries.

While the number of items and the specific information that was presented with each product image varied, all of the sites had basically the same galleries.

What was different were the pages between the home page and the galleries. We call these "department pages", because they represent what's sold in a specific store's departments.

For these sites, "departments" were categories such as women's swimwear or table linen.

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