or How To Develop Your Website’s Information Architecture (IA)

When given a web design project, many designers jump straight into developing the visual look of the homepage. It’s true that you will eventually need to work out where the navigation goes, and how to program it, but how can you going to design a navigation if you aren’t 100% sure how many navigation buttons are needed? Programming the site will be so much easier when every element and page has been defined for it’s role in the overall success of the site.

Detailed plans of how many pages are needed, where they appear in relation to each other, and to what other pages they link to is essential to the site’s success. No matter how beautifully designer your pages are, a flaw in the original plan can render all of your programming and designing worthless if you find you overlooked a page.

The solution: Think structure first, rather than visual design.

Information architecture or site structure is the foundation for great web design. Usability is the prime consideration in the creation of a site.

The simplest and cleanest visual designs often yield the best information design as well.

Define Goals and Strategy

• What is the purpose of your site?
• How will you communicate this to your audience?
• Identify your users/target audience

• Who do you want to reach (target audience)?
• What information do they want (user needs)?

• How do you create a structure that will meet both client and user needs?
• How many categories and sub-categories should the site structure have?
• What is the total number of pages?

• What copy and graphics are available?
• What needs to be created?
• Who will create additional content?
• What will be added in the future? How will the site grow?

Site Structure
The way your site is structured is crucial to it’s success. Websites are typically structured like a tree. Starting from the home page, they branch out in sections and subsections.

Putting together a sitemap helps you visualize the structure of the site as well and helps you realize the content that you’ll need to gather.

How to Develop Your Site Structure
Developing site structure is all about content and information strategy — determining how to organize information so that site users can find it quickly and easily. Whether working on a brand new site or a redesign, whether the budget is $500 or $500,000, the need for a logical structure is a constant, the look of your design will depend upon it.

Gather Information
Gather as much as you can even if it’s more than you need. What isn’t necessary can be discarded later. If, after you have started production on a site, you find that you have not collected enough info, and new pages and categories are needed, you will most likely find that you will have to start the design and programming again from the beginning, having wasted valuable time.

Sort/Organize the Information
Most website information is sorted by hierarchy, moving from a general overview (the home page) down through specific categories and sub-sections. The information should be ranked in importance and organized logically.

Focus on your site’s purpose and find a way to balance the information in categories that help communicate your goals. Think, how can you organize the content so that the user will experience what your client wants them to while finding the content they are looking for easily?

If the IA organization fails the site fails.

Check your categories for appropriate balance. If one section appears to have way more information than others, analyze it to see if that is appropriate for the overarching goal, or if it can be divide this into subsections.

Try to avoid too many layers as this will confuse the user. The sitemap below illustrates a possible layout of a small designer’s portfolio website. There is one top (level 1) heading, 3 main categories (level 2), and 3 sub-categories off of a main category (level 3).

The Three Click Rule
If your website has a lot of pages it would be nearly impossible to link to every one of them on the home page. That is why Content Organization is so important. People should be able to get the info they are looking for within 3 clicks or they will start to get frustrated and leave the site.

People don’t have time to learn things that are too complicated. Whether you’re designing a website, developing a new product, or trying to get your point across in a discussion, it’s good to remember that most people do have limited patience.

That’s why simplicity is important.