Creating A Website Structure (Information Architecture)

A well-thought out structure is important for your website. Think of it as the framework upon which you will place the different aspects of your business - the face of your company (Home), what you are selling (Our Products), corporate information (About Us), what makes you different (Our Approach), contact details (Contact Us):

That is a typical website structure. You need to think about what kind of a structure you want to have and the best way to start is on a piece of paper or in an Excel sheet. The words you use are important too. Use words that your customers would find familiar - for example 'Goggles', instead of 'Optical Protection', or 'Contact Us', instead of 'Customer Care'. Also, think of words that your customers might use in online searches. Having these words in your website structure make it search-friendly and help you score some SEO points.

So how do you figure out what kind of a structure to have? Here's a simple way - there's a bunch of things you do, a bunch of things you sell and a bunch of people you need to tell about all this. Where do you start? You are now going to order your business and all your activities into neat little boxes.

What's the most important thing that you do?

Make pizzas? Provide dance lessons? Build hi-tech widgets for the International Space Station? Put it down.

What's the next most important thing that you are into?

Salads? Yoga classes? Space suits? Put that down too.

What's the third-most important thing you do? Put that down as well. You might be doing 20 such things but lets start with three. In the end you might get a list like this:

or if you are a travel company:

or if you're into rocket science:

Next, you want to tell your audience a little bit about yourself, your expertise, your team and any other information about what makes you the best at what you do:

And then:

Lets put a "Home" in the beginning and finally we get something like this:

That's called a site map. Easy so far.

Then you start adding more information inside that structure:

That's a complete site map. The easiest way to make a site map is in an Excel sheet. Keep your structure simple - this will help your website users find your information easily and not overwhelm them at first glance.