[Sigia-l] How big is big?

[Stewart Dean]

>From: "Donna Maurer" <donna at maadmob.net>
>To: sIGIA-L <sigia-l at asis.org>
>Subject: RE: [Sigia-l] Site maps for web apps, vs for content sites?
>Date: Sat, 11 Feb 2006 23:18:56 +1100
>
>Entirely off-thread but I thought the perception of size was interesting.
>
>To me, less than 1000 pages is small (less than 200 is teeny) and it 
>doesn't get large
>until about 10,000, massive isn't until at least 40,000 (and then they have 
>to be messy,
>heterogeneous)
>
>No wonder I think differently ;) No wonder I can never figure out how you 
>all represent
>a site with a diagramatic site map.
>
>Donna

Good point Donna.

I tend to work europe based blue chip websites for major UK companies. These 
tend to be mostly information based, mostly around product, services and 
support information with tools to hook into CRM etc. Very rarely do these 
sites touch 1000 pages. If you start including individual FAQ pages, press 
releases etc the page count would shoot up.

I can image if you are doing web pages that are a destination to themselves 
then the page count goes up. For sites up to this size a top down approach 
is fine.  As soon as you mention 10000 page sites then I presume that's not 
10000 unique 'pages' but 10000 pages of content most of which are the same 
template with different cotent. I would still be drawing site maps to show 
how the man funcationality of the site interacts.

I may be suffering from the 'if you're used to using a hammer a screw is 
just a crinkle cut nail' approach but I'm interested to find out how 
'gnarly' - that is how unique the page level design is for these large sites 
and how you ensure others undestand the IA.

Cheers

Stewart Dean