A Site Structure Pattern from
Patterns for Personal Web Sites

Reward Exploration

For a site to be truly rewarding, a visitor must be able to stumble across unexpected things. If a home page links to every page on the site, there's no chance for a visitor to be surprised while exploring your site. Visitors won't get the satisfying feeling that an unexpected discovery brings.

Therefore, reward exploration by providing material (pages or content) that the visitor doesn't expect.

This pattern comes into being spontaneously as a site grows. Beyond a certain size, it's just not possible to list all of a site's contents on its home page. The pages that fall through the gaps will engender an "ah-ha!" when visitors run across them.

If a site becomes large enough, this pattern can arise even if the site uses Index Pages.

As for content, reward exploration by providing material visitors might not expect. For example, a tutorial page could offer itself as a Downloadable Weblet. If you don't announce the Downloadable Weblet's existence elsewhere on the site, it will come as a pleasant surprise to whoever visits that page.

Another structural pattern that rewards explorers is Secret Garden.



Last updated 17 June 2002
http://www.rdrop.com/~half/Creations/Writings/Web.patterns/reward.exploration.html
All contents ©2002 Mark L. Irons