How do YOU organize pages, create a site map, and use hyperlinks?

Question

I had to get out of bed to bring this up with you all; I couldn't stop thinking about this next learning curve. It is: How shall I organize the topics I have in my website? One extreme is to have all of the topics showing in all of the nav bars at the top of all the pages. The opposite extreme is ............ I cannot truly visualize it.
I think that the big obstacle for me is that i don't want to hide any pages so well, so slickly, that they can be found only by the most focused and persistent website visitor. I can see how some pages could be lost to a lot of casual website viewers.
On the other hand, there are some pages that are natural groups. In my case, the U.B.R.O.L. group is that. It is made up of five people and me. I have one page for a photo slideshow which has one photo of each of us, but then I have a separate page for Nigel and his photos, a separate page for Vali and her long bio and photos, and a separate page for Helen, her short bio and her many photos.
Tonight I tried making hierarchies using hyperlinks, so that U.B.R.O.L. shows up in the Site Menu, but Nigel, Vali, Helen, and Peggy do not show up. To get to their photos, one would have to click onto the U.B.R.O.L. group page. Once at the U.B.R.O.L. page, one can then click onto Vali's, Nigel's, and Helen's page, and then from each of their pages there are 3 hyperlinks: one to return to U.B.R.O.L., and three more hyperlinks to click onto the others who have personal pages. (Peggy does not have a personal page because she is shy and never gave me more photos or a bio of herself. She prefers anonymity.)
But even though I put those hyperlinks on those pages, I am having an internal concept war, my friends, and a solution is not at hand.
I am thinking of how I am going to deal with the pages made for me, my husband, and my husband and I together.
I cannot imagine clearly how a Site Menu would look at the topmost level and much less of an idea how each page would look several levels down.
I welcome any direction you could send my way. I would like to know how you organized your pages, how you decided which pages would not be listed in the nav bar, and what you did to/with the pages that were not listed in the nav bar.
Would you please send me the URL of your website so that I can SEE what you are talking about? I am not good at imagining what people say; I have to see it rather than imagine it.
Lorna in Southern California

Answer 1

Lorna, mostly from reading books, Iearned the following things.
•Don't make me think (actually the title of an excellent book on webdesign)
•Every information should be available in at most 3 clicks
•Tell them where they are, where they can go and where they have been.
IMHO, iWeb lends itself fairly well for these last 2 criteria. The Navbar is a very useful tool and I suggest you do not go too far away from it.
On my current issue of the toy theatre magazine (which is NOT a beautiful website) I wanted to go in 3 languages; English, German and Dutch. I knew i was courting disaster but one can be so ambitious. This in fact meant that I had to do 3 sites. Sites being defined as a group of pages structurally belonging to each other.
So I made an Index/Splash page with a nice picture, a title and 3 flags. These being links to the 3 versions. (I did not want to make them think on the Splashpage).
Clicking a flag brings the visitor to a Contents page on their version of the site. Just like the Contents page in a book. Here they can choose to go to any of the items and on each and every page of the site is a Contents button that returns them there.
Pages are numbered in the middle of the website, and to the leftside the number of (and link to) the previous page and to the right the same for the next page.
The current issue is number 25, ( http://www.vischmarktpapierentheater ), the previous 24 were done in Freeway and the design stems from there.
The translation to iWeb did work well but in the end the result was disappointing mostly because I wanted some slideshows, hated the "None .Mac accounts" version and went overboard with Keynote slideshows, really ugly.
The other problem stems from the triple language idea. This meant that I had to do either 3 versions of each slideshow, or make one version accessible for every language. This menat some convoluted linking which I will never do again.
In short If you want to go "deep", make various sites and link each starting page to you Index/Splash, keep the starting pages of each site on the Navbar Make a Contents sidebar or something like that on each of the starting pages, and than you can go anywhere within the required 3 clicks.
Good Luck
Harry