Designing section home pages

Section home pages play a similar role to home pages. They act as a gateway to the content within a section of a website and can be designed in a similar way.

Guidelines for designing section home pages:

• carefully plan the use of section home page real estate, and use the central part of the screen for navigation
• do not use section navigation columns on a section home page (except where sites use section navigation as site-wide navigation)
• within a site, section home page layouts should be similar, though different from layout of the home page
• do not copy the Monash University home page.

Section home page with section navigation acting as global navigation

If the site is master brand then section navigation can be developed to act as global navigation around the site. The following figure shows a site with three sections. The section home page has section navigation which links to each of the three sections along with a link at the top to the site's home page.

Section home page with no section navigation

A second option, if the section home page doesn't have section navigation acting as global navigation, is that the page will simply link to content pages underneath it.

The following figure shows a site with three sections. The first two sections contain a number of grouped content pages. Each group contains an index and a number of sub pages. For these two sections the section home page contains a link to the index of each one of these content groups.

Example of good section home page navigation design

The Monash staff page is an example of good section home page navigation. The main content available for staff is highlighted through a series of links that occupy the primary screen real estate.

See also

• Accessibility guidelines for navigation