Website Through Genre Lenses - Emerging Conventions in Website Content Structure

Over a few decades, the Internet has developed out of research project into an indispensable part of our lives. We are pretty sure almost everything is on the Web, but can we find it there? In real world, when navigating in a novel place, we look for familiar signs to guide us. On the Web too, we apply our experience to figure out the path. How well does it work? Browsing is still less productive and less popular than searching. Searching works when we know what we are looking for. But what if our need is not clear and we would rather look around? Has the Web reached the state when an intuitive navigation becomes possible? The study explored emerging conventions in content structure of academic and corporate sites. The identified trends were translated into the prototype content structures. The study also found users to possess some expectations of website content organization, which they relied on, interacting with the sites. Match between expectations and reality was shown to affect the success of this interaction. The book will be of interest to website architects, user experience professionals, as well as to developers of intelligent searching and browsing algorithms.