Organize your content around what visitors are trying to accomplish, not how your department is structured. This approach helps users find information faster and reduces frustration by aligning navigation with their goals.
Start by picturing the people who land on your pages and what they came to do. A prospective student is looking for compelling outcomes and program prerequisites. A current student needs registration dates or a contact for their advisor. When you group and label content around those tasks rather than around your office's internal structure, visitors spend less time hunting and more time getting what they need.
Choose the right content type, and use it to nest related content. Most everyday content lives on a Page, but the CMS also gives you larger structures for grouping pages together. Use Topics and Categories to group related content. Both work as containers that hold related pages, and the difference is how that content is presented to visitors. A Topic feeds the site's native menu, so the pages nested under it appear in your navigation. A Category instead displays its pages as a list, which is useful for a set of related items meant to be browsed together.
You can place a Category inside a Topic, or set one up directly at the site, department, or program level, depending on whether the group belongs in your main navigation or works better as a standalone list. See Content Types for the full list and what each one can hold.
Keep content for current students separate from content for prospective students. These two audiences arrive with very different goals, and mixing their information on the same page or under the same grouping forces each of them to wade through content meant for the other. Give each audience its own Topic or Category, so that someone looking to apply and someone looking to register each follow a clean, dedicated path.
Put the most important information first. Most people scan a page instead of reading it top to bottom, so lead with what visitors most want to know and save the background and context for further down. A page about a deadline should open with the deadline, not with a history of the program.
Break long pages into short, clearly labeled sections. Short paragraphs, descriptive headings, and lists are far easier to scan than one long block of text, and splitting content into smaller pieces also makes a page easier to maintain. You can update one section without disturbing the rest.
Keep your set of pages lean. Every extra page is one more thing for a visitor to sort through and for you to keep current, so if two pages cover the same ground, combine them, and if a page is outdated or no longer serves a clear goal, update it or take it down. A smaller set of accurate, well-organized pages almost always serves visitors better than a large, sprawling one.
Once your structure supports your visitors' goals, you can make each page work harder. See SEO Optimization for help making your content easy to find through search, and Creating Accessible Web Content to make sure every visitor can use it.