Alright so here is the deal (more of a whine from my end) My boss wanted me to give her a general outline, and ideas for a webpage the company I work for wants to put out in the next week. I gave them a clue as to what to link, what the content should be, and some general pointers on how to do it. I send my proposal to my boss who just TEARS apart one of contents on my pages, tearing out quick links, pictures and making it into a text heavily (im talking 4/5 paragraphs no pictures just text, no quick links, just paragraph breaks). This got me thinking... if you are going to an information site what makes it a good site where you can gather a good amount of information without being overwhelmed?

If it's really numerous pages documents, think 10 pages and up, provide PDF files. No one likes reading that much on a website.

Perhaps it's an idea to just provide the first paragraph followed by a "Read more" link that leads to either a PDF doc or the full text.

If you're going for putting the entire text online, break it up in pages. That way you can easily pick up where you left if you had to quit reading (and reduce load times).

Do add some pictures if you can, but around the text (not in the text).

If the text looks like legal texts, you can be sure people will find it just as boring (even if the content is actually interesting).

"What is mind, don't matter. What is matter, nevermind!" - Homer J. Simpson.

For an information site, the layout is very important to me..navigation is key as I would want to access links to information as quickly and as easily as possible. The navigation bar should be somewhere prominent and familiar like on the left or top, and be kept constant throughout all the pages so I don't get confused and frustrated. Content, navigation, etc should be divided with clear boundaries, so that I know what each part of the layout is for exactly. Subpages could come as links beneath each title on the navigation bar for easier referencing.

For each section or page, the information should be broken up into appropriate blocks with clear and concise titles, so I can glance at everything in an instance and pick out what bits I want to be reading, without having to scroll through endless lines of text and reading everything on every page. Colours are a great help as well, to differentiate information or sections at a single glance, or to highlight important details.

I find it helpful when a search function is included in such sites, which helps me find what I'm looking for at a single click. You can reference from a lot of tutorial sites, which are primarily content heavy, yet easy to navigate and retrieve information from. Here are a couple you could reference from:
http://www.cplusplus.com/doc/tutorial/
http://page-flip.com/
http://www.kirupa.com/
http://www.pslover.com/

Just Yean's 2¢!

Nielsen is supposedly a big usability guy even if his own webpage looks like ####: http://www.useit.com/

Guy sounds like a jackass. Most people don't freak out about tabs being used for navigation compared to alternate views of the same content. I find it ironic that he'd say "correctly uses tabs" as opposed to "incorrectly". There is no prescribed correct or incorrect ways to structure a site. In fact, every major evolution of design starts with a site which is "noncompliant" but people like it anyway.

There's numerous guidelines on how to set up a site, however, if you want to follow industry standards. I'd avoid saying what's "correct" or "incorrect" however, since design is primarily and fundamentally a subjective thing.