Comments on Improving Usability with a Website Index

Michael Heraghty — Tue, 28 Aug 2007 00:46:30 GMT

It might be worth considering the way the index is broken up, for search engine optimisation purposes.

Google highly recommends including a sitemap; an index clearly fulfils the same function (providing text links to each section of the site, to that Google’s bots can spider it).

However, Google warns that its bots will not follow more than 100 links on any one page. Thus, each page of the index should contain no more than 100 pages.

Chava — Tue, 28 Aug 2007 00:46:30 GMT

Our index is similar to the one given in the example of People Soft – but my question is how is one meant to use the index?

They are difficult to scan. We have been trying to improve scannability but havent managed to come up with anything satisfactory

Alan — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:50:27 GMT

Re: multiple indexes. Studies of multiple indexes in books (e.g. subject index, name index) seem to conclude that they are a bad idea – users often fail to make use of all the indexes or search for a term in the wrong index. I’ve never seen anything dealing with multiple indexes in websites. Multiple indexes would detract from the ‘scannability’ highlighted in the article.

Jason — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:50:27 GMT

While this is an interesting article, there are a couple of issues it does not address:

1. When or under what circumstances is using an index NOT the way to go?
2. Should any one site use multiple indicies? Or does this mitigate an index’s usefulness?