Recently there have been many efforts to develop hypermedia systems. Hypermedia applications can be categorized into process-oriented or contents-oriented. However, it is not a trivial task to build contents-oriented hypermedia in a systematic fashion. The contents-oriented hypermedia systems are developed primarily for the applications of marketing or information services. This paper proposes a methodology for a contents-oriented hypermedia system. Hypermedia contents are typically structured in the form of hierarchies. An index node can be used in order to give an effective access to this hierarchical structure. The proposed methodology employs three types of nodes(contents, index and function) and various navigation mechanisms, and helps design contents-oriented hypermedia systematically. Furthermore, various design techniques are proposed for maintaining contents-oriented hypermedia systems that have an evolutionary feature. Two real-life cases are illustrated to demonstrate the applicability of the methodology.