Citizensheep. "Michael Grimes lives in Birmingham (UK). This is his blog about anything that he fancies."

A good web presence is a bit like a large public park: it has a main entrance, possibly one or two franchises, and clear indications that you’re inside it.

I’ve recently been struggling a bit with explaining why I think an organisation’s web presence need not be concentrated onto one ‘front page’, and this analogy is the best I’ve come up with so far.

A large public park may have any number of entrances, but it will usually have a main one. Often this main entrance will contain a reception desk, or even a visitors’ centre, where you can find out all about the park and its features. These may include its history, its opening times and the location of ponds, picnic areas and any branded franchises (such as coffee shops or cafes).

However, many visitors to the park will enter through different entrances. Therefore in order to find their way around they need to be given clear and appropriate signs (too much signage, for example, will distract and confuse them, and will quite likely spoil the nature of the park).

Each feature could be moved somewhere else and nothing about it would suggest it had ever had a connection with the park; it is the design of the park itself that gives them that clear context.

And so it is, I think, with an organisation’s web presence. It may include a number of different projects, but these needn’t all be vying for place on a front page. Indeed, the front page should be clear about its purpose and able to help visitors get to the bits that are of interest to them; it shouldn’t be choking under the weight of every aspect of the organisation’s work. And it shouldn’t be promoting something simply because someone thinks that putting it on the front page will magically do their communications work for them: it won’t; in fact, if everyone did that (and they often do) it would probably only serve to dilute it.

Each piece of an organisation’s work should concentrate on achieving its own goals and reaching its own audiences (firmly in the context of the broader organisational strategy, of course); the larger web presence – or, rather, the strategic collection of the organisation’s elements on the internet – should be managed in such a way that each of these disparate elements are recognisable within it and are enabled to flourish.

That’s all great in theory; currently I don’t do any of this very well in practice (but I’m trying). I thought I’d post it anyway though, in case the park analogy is useful to anyone else.

Update

Just to make it clear, I’m not advocating silos. A branch of an organisation needs to have the freedom and flexibility to meet its own strategic goals, but it must also allow visitors easily to navigate and make sense of the organisation’s work as a whole.

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communication