What I have been spending my time on is creating a filing system for the pages. As I mentioned in my August 7 e-mail, the existing site has almost no hierarchy. There are more than 250 pages and for all practical purposes they are spread out on your dining room table (or several dining room tables) ordered by title or date but nothing else. Who can maintain a site like that???
So I’ve created a “filing” system with fewer than a dozen “drawers” (parent pages), and folders and subfolders and even sub-subfolders of child pages. Actually there are no drawers or folders (it’s not like your computer system); it’s just a hierarchy of pages. But when you create a new page, it is important to try to “file” it correctly by identifying its parent page. (See the “Add a new page” FAQ at Getting Started.) However, if you later decide that you put it in the wrong place, it is easy enough to move.
Please note that this behind-the-scenes hierarchy has little or nothing to do with how we ultimately choose to organize navigation through the site (although I hope it will be related.) It addresses primarily the concerns of the third “audience” for our work, which is the builders and maintainers of the site. In particular, for example, several of the pages in the top menu are NOT parent pages, including the one linked above, which is the grandchild of a parent page.
The hierarchy is visible in both the title name and it in the breadcrumbs at the top of the page when you view it.