cardboard. Keep doing this till you have jotted down everything - don't worry if there is a lot of it, since space is not usually a problem on a web site.

The squares of cardboard are now collected into groups; each group of cardboard squares is put into a small box The members of the group should be related to one another, eg the photographs of a particular holiday or the data of your widget type 12W.

A limited number of small boxes, all with the same sort of information, should fit into a bigger box, so that the bigger box contains a number of smaller boxes, each of which has the photographs of a particular holiday, or smaller boxes each with the data on a particular type of widget you make. The bigger box is then labelled "holiday photographs" or "widgets data".

Each group of bigger boxes should be grouped on a table; the photography table will hold various boxes, with one box labelled "holidays" and another "family and friends" while a third one holds "pets" and a fourth photographs of your home. If you are a small manufacturing company, your table might house one large box marked "widgets", a second box is marked "doodahs", a third one will be called "prices and terms of delivery" and a fourth might be called "facts about the company".

Finally, there might be several tables in the room; one table holds photographs, the next holds boxes with the biographies of members of the family and a third table holds the boxes with diaries of the family. In a similar way, the room with a table on the Widget Manufacturing Co might also house a table with the Widget Servicing Co and the Widget Finance Co.

In this way, somebody looking for a picture of a street in a small village in Italy, a photograph taken in 2004, will first go to the table of photographs, then to the big box with holiday snapshots, the small box with snapshots of the holiday in 2004 and finally pick up the cardboard square labelled "small village street in Firenze". Somebody wanting more information on widget 12W will first go the table that belongs to the Widget Manufacturing Co, then look in the big box labelled "widgets" and then in the little box marked "widget type 12W"

Such a way or organising information allows anyone using the web site to find out any given piece of information quickly and easily. It may take quite a few days or even weeks to sort out all the information you want to

put on your web site, but this time is well spent, and will make life much and much easier for the visitor.

As if we cared about what the visitor wants! Many web sites do give that impression; they are obviously designed by professional web site designers, using all the gadgets associated with up-to-date web design programs, mainly to impress the managing director of the company who is paying them. It's the small company, the small association or club which wants to make visitors feel welcome so as to encourage them to join the association or buy the goods offered by the company.

As Robert Townsend, the former director of Avis Rent-a-Car - who proudly announced "We're No. 2 so we try harder" - wrote, it is absolutely necessary that the managing director of a company goes to a phone outside in the street and rings the company to see how he gets treated. That should be the attitude of anyone designing a web site. Ask a friend to look at your web site and find a particular piece of information; stand by his side (keeping quiet) and watch him as he navigates his way through your web site. You're not the best in the world, you're not a professional, so you should try harder. And listen to what your friend (or another person) has to say.

Producing such a hierarchy may well take days and days or even weeks, it depends on how much information you want to put on to your site and how complicated the relationship between the different pieces of data is. Days or weeks sounds excessive, but in fact this is perfectly normal, and the time taken to organise your data will make all the difference in quality.

No more than 4 mouse clicks

If you go into a public library, you will find all the reference books arranged in what is known as the Dewey Decimal System. Suppose I want to find out more about electronics; I go to the 500 section (Science), then choose the 530 section (physics) and lastly the 537 section (electrics and electronics). Now comes the decimal point, and after the decimal point I can look at books on transistors (537.2) and then on special sorts of transistors (537.27) and so on.

The Dewey system was organised long before the web was even thought of, but essentially it's the same as a point and click system. Each page has ten choices, and by the fourth click you're on to 537.2 and you are now looking at books on transistors.