Time and money spent improving the architecture of your website is almost never wasted. It is important, though, to have a few basic concepts under your belt before you turn that single page into a complex matrix.

What many people aren't aware of is that the more your visitors are required to click, the less likely they are to stick around and investigate the rest of your site. Clicking's hard work, as it turns out. That's why you need to find a balance between too many clicks and too few.

There's a lot going for the single page site. If you can fit everything you need on the one page, do it. It's simple for you to design and painless for your customers. It should be quite clear if your site needs more structure.

Not everyone is afforded the luxury of simplicity. Most sites take the form of a hierarchy of some description. Hierarchies start with a home-page, or small group of primary pages, that link through to secondary pages. Typically the secondary pages will be grouped into a series of categories.

The way in which you arrange these categories depends upon how complex your hierarchy needs to be, as well as how the size of your budget.

If it's a particularly extensive, or ‘deep', hierarchy, an effective way of making it easily navigable is to use a ‘breadcrumb' navigation bar. You often come across these on the larger governmental sites. Usually found at the top of a page, they consist of a string of links to the pages that have led you to where you are currently; kind of a browsing timeline that can double as an extensive SEO signifier.

Although breadcrumb trails are cheaper to produce, a system of tabs signifying your secondary categories is the most prevalent and effective tool for navigating a site. Again, depending on budget constraints, creating tabs that trigger drop-down menus detailing each individual secondary page saves your customers the need to click twice.

Ideally, you'd be able to click through to any area of the site from any other area, with a ‘matrix' style architecture. This is the most complex structure to establish and the most difficult to maintain, but, as you'd expect, it also allows for the best click to outcome ratio.

So, you've established the best hierarchical framework for the purposes of the primary and secondary stages of your site. If you are simply providing information, you needn't go any further. If the purpose of your site requires you to convince customers to complete a process, then you'll need to investigate some of the lesser architectural patterns.

A funnel structure works as you'd expect it to. It's a series of webpages that lead linearly in a single direction. This structure is used for functions like checkout or purchase systems.

A circular structure links from the home to some kind of function page, which in turn links to an outcome page, itself linked back to both the function and the homepage. This is utilised in gambling sites, as well as automated, result based online services like calculators, or translation services.

Remember that before you start constructing your site, you need to have your search parameters laid out clearly. Keep them in mind every time you construct a heading or a link to another of your pages, and especially with first level pages. Your first-time visitors need to be reassured that they've come to the right place, after all.

And try to remain aware of the sites you tend to visit online. Take note of the things that you like/don't like about them and keep these in mind as you're designing/redesigning and establish whether or not you can factor them into your budget. #