Last Blogger

Note:I wrote this a while ago on another blog that is being shut down. So I thought I’d give it a new home here. Enjoy

Breadcrumbs are all over the web. We see them every day and it’s generally agreed that they’re a very positive element to include on your website in order to help users orient themselves within a webspace. But if you look around the web, you’ll find that not every website uses breadcrumbs. There’s a simple reason for that. Managing breadcrumbs properly is a lot harder than it seems.

The reason that managing breadcrumbs is so difficult is that most websites don’t have a formal information architecture plan. Without a formal information architecture plan, creating breadcrumbs tends to happen in a haphazard manner. This haphazard generation of breadcrumbs will, in the best case, be less effective than properly planned out breadcrumbs. In the worst case they can actually be harmful to a users understanding of your website structure.

If you’ve already put the effort into developing a proper information architecture for your website then you’re half-way.

The next component you’re going to need is a content management system that will handle breadcrumbs. There are certainly some content management systems that support breadcrumbs, but getting those systems to work exactly the way you want them will require some significant template alterations. Wordpress, the content management system we use here for blogs does support breadcrumbs, but they’re built to support blog based websites by default. Altering the templates and other systems to allow wordpress to behave like a straight content website is definitely feasible, but would be a time consuming technical task indeed.

If you’re fortunate enough to have in-house expertise, then you can either spend the time to alter a working system (and don’t forget to develop a look and feel template for that particular product while you’re at it) or you could build yourself a custom content management system. In either case, it’s a fair amount of work.

So are breadcrumbs really worth it? Well it all really depends on your situation. If you have a small to medium sized website architecture they are far less useful than investing time in well prepared navigation and architecture. If your website’s architecture is large, then they can definitely benefit users. Of note here is that you should be measuring the size and complexity of your website’s architecture and not it’s raw number of pages. The website’s architecture may be extremely simple yet include a significant number of documents. It can also be the case that with a relatively small number of documents, your website is covering many areas across a broad scope, creating a complex architecture. For these reasons, consider the complexity of your website’s architecture when weighing the benefits and significant costs of breadcrumbs.