Hello, I need help trying to come up with a more efficient navigational scheme on a website that has several thousands of pages (tech info site).

It's an encyclopedia where all content is arranged by alphabetical order ( sorted by topics ). This is a fixed element.

Currently, the navigational system:

main nav page ( a-z list )

sub topic ( individual topics listed under a, b, c, d, etc )

...because there are so many subtopics, there is a third navigation page to link to each individual article under each topic.

As you can see, it's too many clicks away from the homepage...awkward.

Is there any better way to do this? I've played with tree menus ( not going to work, simply too many pages ).

I am wondering if I am limited to relying on a search engine to find the way through the site.

Please Help!

dblis

How does WikiPedia do this? Search, and categories. I think those are your best options. You could also check out other bigger sites to see how they did this.

Possibly to use tags for each article/item so that people can conduct advanced searches. Say tags of "vista" and "error" would show articles/items with those tags.

why you dont use a cms?

Is your site manually maintained or driven by some sort of CMS?

I think its hard to avoid too much clicking to make your way down the heirarchy. Certainly you want Search (be it via your CMS or by using Google site search).

At the top of each section, maybe have most popular categories, most popular articles, most recently added articles etc. This will get people some way into the content.

I agree that tags and tag clouds would be useful - especially as the A-Z approach requires that people already have some notion of the categories and know where to head to. Using tags will allow a more random, non-linear path through the site.

Without knowing your content - another way to organise things might be by author, date added, length of article or number of comments/votes etc.

Hope thats useful

As others have pointed out, sounds like you need to add categories - not knowing what kind of "tech info" the site covers it's hard to offer options... I'd say look at how some of your competitors do it for ideas. And you definitely need some way to search the site if you don't have one!