Natwerk Designs

I need some help in website design...?

I work in one of six departments which all share the same website. Each department provides similar services and hosts similar events. Our webmasters over the entire site organized our links so they jump between departments to save efforton upkeep of redundant webpages. For instance, rather than have separate pages with a local map for each department, there is a map on one department's page that all the departments' links are connected to. Our department has come to find that the interlinked site is confusing and clients/school districts are accidentally registering for the other departments' events. I've been delegated the resonsibility to organize our section of website and solve this issue. Does anybody have experience managing a number of related site? How could we set our section of the site apart and avoid confusion. I've considered adding an image or tiling a watermark to the back of all our pages, any creative or effective ideas?

Public Comments

1. Keep in mind your problem won't be solved by coming up with a clever image or watermark, it most definitely will be solved through simplicity. How you choose to build your site is usually the first step in getting control of unruly linking back and forth between multiple pages. I suggest using a content management system (CMS) such as drupal or joomla (these are the two most popular, and FREE). I prefer drupal. http://drupal.org/ Once you get a cms installed which should only take a short while, then you can focus on installing different modules http://drupal.org/project/Modules and themes to make the site suit your liking. Another reason I suggest a cms is because I believe they have some build in functionality to manage multiple sites with different domain names all from one single installation though you'd have to research this yourself. If all your departments are on the same doman name, etc somethingsomething.com, then you can have a different page set up with a different logo at the top and title and have one single top level "community" page with the menu items at the top being each department. Otherwise, if they are on different domains, I'd suggest buying a new domain name and having it be the top level page so each department doesn't feel like it's being shafted for not being "the" page to go to.