Organization

How does TWU organize thousands of pages and assets? By breaking everything down into manageable sections. Learn about the large structure and how you can best organize your part of it.

High-level: Division/Department/Topic organization

Generally, on the site, we take advantage of how we're organized around campus to help do the same thing on the web. (The logic behind this is that it makes it simpler to know what we each need to manage and it also makes sure that each aspect of the University gets some representation on the web.)

A couple of examples of this:

  • Student Life (division) > Community Life (department) > International Programs (sub-department) > International Week (topic)
  • Enrolment (division) > Enrolment Services (department) > Important Dates (topic)
  • Academics > FPSPA > Music > Choir > Upcoming Concerts

And we use folders and subfolders to go from general to more specific.

On Your Site

Usually, you'll be working on just a portion of the website - for example, the Music Department's website. This allows you to focus just on the things that are unique to your department, such as topics like Choir or Band, or maybe special projects going on. Whatever you find pertinent to your department can have a page.

A general rule of thumb is that when you grow to have more than 8 or 10 pages in a folder, start looking for patterns and ways you can reorganize those pages into more folders.

Back to the Music Department example, you might make pages about

  • Choir
  • Band
  • New Compositions

As time goes on, there may be more topics to write about, so that might grow to

  • Concert Choir
  • Chamber Choir
  • Concert Band
  • Jazz Band
  • New Compositions
  • Rep and Studio
  • Concert with the VSO
  • Christmas Concert
  • Spring Concert
  • Music Department News
At this point, it's time to re-organize a bit. For example, we could make new folders for Choirs, Bands, and Concerts:
  • Choirs
    • Concert Choir
    • Chamber Choir
  • Bands
    • Concert Band
    • Jazz Band
  • New Compositions
  • Rep and Studio
  • Concerts
    • Concert with the VSO
    • Christmas Concert
    • Spring Concert
  • Music Department News

Now suppose that the Music Department News page is getting really long (with news going back for a year.) If you want to hang on to those older news releases, you could split up that page into several pages, like this:

  • ...
  • Music Department News
    • Current
    • Archive - 2007
    • Archive - 2006
The actual content of the site is up to you and your department to decide.