Sector supports a variety of Information Architecture principles, and one is to organise your content hierarchically–both in menu trees and on your pages.
Hierarchical content is stored in pages and organised in a menu tree. For example, this sample page is a node of the content type Page added to Level 2 in the main menu.
The concept works well with:
- Linear content structure and user movements (book like content - navigating from A to B to C)
- 'Layered' information architecture ('information about information' in promotional or introductory top layers).
Known limitations:
- Scalability - a menu hierarchy fails if there are too many items per level, or if the weight between branches is unbalanced.
- Hierarchical content assumes the principal of 'one page, one position'. This often does not work in a web context - if the principle is broken, context for the page is lost.
Supporting content hierarchies on a page
Organising content hierarchically does not stop with your menu, and is even more important while organising the content on your page.
Sector's Display options and our Styles and design components allow editors to structure content on a page in a visual hierarchy. For example, both the homepage and this page are nodes of the content type Page, but we have chosen very different display options.
The homepage uses a maximal hero area with a background banner, centred text, title captions, subtitles and call to action buttons for maximal visual impact. This page focuses on informational content, using a minimal Hero with left-centred text, and no banner, subtitle or title captions to allow the reader to concentrate on the text. Again, all settings the editor can choose from Sector's Display options.