The classical structure of a website is that of a tree. The trunk is the homepage. From there you climb the tree, upward and outward until finally you reach the leaves. That is how we design websites. That is how we test websites.
It’s just not how we use websites.
Actually, more to the point, we don’t use websites at all. What we actually use are:
- The Web.
- Web pages.
If we want information on something, we do not say to ourselves, I wonder what websites might have information on that. We say, I wonder what Google will turn up on that. We do not use a website to find the information, we use the entire web (courtesy of Google).
When we follow the search results that Google gives us, they do not lead us to web sites (unless they are paid links), they lead us to individual web pages. Those pages are, of course, part of a website, but we don’t experience them as such. We experience them as pages.
If we find a particularly useful page, we bookmark it for later use. We bookmark the page, not the website.
Sometimes we find a page we want to share with friends. We share the page, not the website. (Feel free to share this page.)
Sometimes a good page will have links to other pages. We may visit them. We go straight from page to page. We do not navigate the website. The page might be on another website. There is a chance we won’t even notice.
After we have finished on a page, we hit the back button to go back to the previous page. We do not navigate the website to get there. The previous page might be on another website. There is a chance we won’t even notice.
If we are curious about something on a page, and there is no obvious link a page that will explain it, we highlight the phrase and do “Search Google for…”. We do not use the website to find out more. We use the web.
The tree is upside down. The first thing we meet are the leaves. We don’t always know which tree they belong to. We don’t always care. When we have finished with one leaf, we move to another. It doesn’t matter very much if it is a leaf on the same tree.
Yet we design websites as if the tree were the right way up. We test websites as if the tree were the right way up. It isn’t. The tree is upside down. It is the leaves that matter.
Every page is page one.