# Mining Domain-Specific Design Patterns: A Case Study +
## 4 The Case Study
### Domain-Specific Design Patterns for Educational Websites  
In this section, we present some of the domain-specific design patterns that we have identified in this case study. We have classified these patterns into three main categories based on their common design characteristics concerning their layout, navigation structure, and functionality. Examples of patterns included in these categories along with a short category description are provided below. Layout Category: this category includes patterns that provide developers with standard compositions of Joomlal' components and modules which are widely used in educational websites for browsing the various information objects appearing in educational websites. Additionally, in many cases, these compositions specify page templates, capturing the most common ways of organizing the various Joomlal' front-end interface elements in order to form a page. For example, Figure 5 presents two of the most commonly used templates in the website collection for specifying the layout of the homepage. Figure 5: Templates for the homepage of educational websites. (**a**) A template for publishing the main content of the homepage in blog layout format; (**b**) A template for publishing the main content of the homepage in the form of an article. The first template in Figure 5a consists of the featured articles component for publishing the main content of the homepage in the form of a blog presenting an overview of a number of articles, and a set of modules, such as banners, menu, latest articles module, etc., for supporting the navigation to other pages of the website. As you can see, except for the main navigation supported by the top menu, the use of banners on the homepage is a very popular way for supporting common user tasks, such as to provide direct navigation to pages which are of common interest, e.g., the available undergraduate and postgraduate studies in a university website, etc. Furthermore, many educational websites include custom HTML modules in their homepage, usually for displaying logos acting as links to external websites and, additionally, a latest articles modules for allowing users to quickly browse the most recently published articles. The second page template in Figure 5b consists of an article page usually displaying a welcome message to visitors and a number of modules, such as custom HTML, menus, etc., for accessing other website pages. The main purpose of both templates is to support the efficient navigation of users from the homepage to other pages in order to easily and rapidly locate the information they are looking for, since the homepage is the starting point for navigating throughout the entire website. The key difference of the second template is that, instead of using banners for direct navigation to the pages publishing important information, it makes use of extra menus. These menus group sets of pages, which are at the same hierarchical level of the website hierarchy, allow users to access them by following the corresponding link. This template is used mainly in websites with deep content hierarchical structures. Moreover, the use of breadcrumbs in this template is very crucial (showing a link for each level of the website, from the homepage to the current page) since it helps users orient themselves and understand the website structure. Another example of a template involving more than one page is depicted in Figure 6 which presents a commonly used pattern for supporting the user's navigation among the hierarchy of categories and subcategories of information objects. It consists of four pages: the first page presents content about an information item, from which users can navigate to a second page displaying a list of its categories. Then, by selecting a list item users can have access to a third page of the same type displaying a list with the subcategories of the selected category and, finally, by selecting a list item, users can navigate to a fourth article page displaying information about the selected subcategory.