The Blueprints of Information Architecture

What is Information Architecture?

Information architecture (IA) is the practice of structuring, labeling and organizing the many different elements of your website. To do this, we will use a site map to visualize all the pages, label and manage content and determine the ultimate layout to ensure a positive customer experience.

Navigation is just one piece of many when it comes to a successful website. Throughout the IA process, we prioritize navigation and proper pathways to keep visitors engaged, active and satisfied. Without this, it's all too easy for customers to become frustrated by not finding the subject matter they seek, waiting too long for pages to load or running into errors.

The Importance of a Well-Structured Website

A website acts as your company's first impression in our digital world. It tells new and existing customers who you are, what you offer and why they can trust you. Websites come in all shapes and sizes to deliver different means, but there are universal standards and expectations when it comes to website design and functionality that can make or break a customer's opinion of your business, including:

1. User Experience: To put it simply, if your website fails to load quickly, is difficult to navigate, has outdated or unhelpful content or simply doesn't match the look and feel of a modern-day, trustworthy brand, you could be losing out on numerous sales. Building tailored user experience journeys is critical in today's world, as this allows customers to quickly find what they need, purchase items and reach out to you directly. Paving the path for your customers ensures they don't follow a separate path to your competitor's website or leave due to frustration.
2. SEO Benefits: Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the digital key to ensuring your content is seen by your target audience. We prioritize writing SEO for people and end users, but we are also diligent about creating SEO-tailored content for search engine needs. For example, we wouldn't add too much content about one specific topic to one specific page but rather spread the content out on multiple pages to ensure its effectiveness. This way, we don't take away from the users' needs but also hit the mark on SEO requirements to improve visibility.
3. Conversion Rates: How information is laid out on a single webpage determines whether someone takes the desired action (ex. purchases an item, fills out a contact form, signs up for a newsletter, etc.). We run through checklists of user needs to ensure the landing page can convert visitors into customers. All our partners, while diverse in offerings, seek to increase their conversion rates month after month, year after year, and a solidly built website can make all the difference here.

Although there is much crossover, IA differs from UX and UI as it focuses on organizing and labeling content to ensure the site is not just usable but understandable and relevant to the overall goals of the organization.

Information architecture involves research, planning and communication. And information architects' work often starts with a complex mass of information and covers three main components, or what we like to call "The Three ABC's":

• Audience. Your target audience is #1 when it comes to understanding, developing and organizing your website. This includes identifying user needs, information-seeking behavior, user experience and the overall purpose of the site.
• Body. The body of your work and messaging includes everything from your written about page to the imagery of your products and services, as well as the backend data supporting your web pages. We review the many different types of documents and data required to develop content for a site, the content's objective, volume of content, as well as existing structure and material.
• Context. This is where the business goals, culture, primary objectives, KPIs and call-to-action objectives come into play. We also look at the funding, resources and constraints we may need to address during this process.

Our Unique Approach

Consultation

With all our partnerships, we take a deep dive and in-depth analysis of the company, the existing brand information, future goals, and the biggest competition.

We understand your competitor's details prior to mapping out your website's information architecture. Making sure the end-user will be able to compare apples to apples is important. For example, if your content is so far off from your closest competitor's content that you use different terminology to separate yourself, you run the risk of an improper evaluation. Even worse, your search relevancy will be negatively impacted. That's why we take the time to fully understand your stance within your industry and space before diving in.

Mapping out the Site

We build a sitemap from scratch, focusing on the personal user journeys. This ensures we are best accommodating your industry's best practices and information discovery while also making room for updated content.

Creating Content

As we map out your site, we will begin to identify any gaps, such as missing content or imagery. We also want to understand what needs to be included on the website to achieve the desired results. Quality content creation is always a part of our process, as we want to expand and enhance current content while also developing rich content tailored to specific segments and providing relevant answers for your customers.

Restructure Navigation and Internal Links

We want to ensure there are clear and simple navigation menus designed for intuitive navigation and that all links are being used for a purpose. The navigation structure is based on UX trends but differs from desktop to mobile devices. These designs and link architecture need to be thought about very specifically to ensure the end-user can get the information they need, regardless of resolution or device.

Let's Start Building

At Web Tech Fusion, we build custom-tailored websites and digital marketing strategies that make the most sense for individual clients. There is no one-size-fits-all approach here. Our unique designs ensure that the user experience, search engine optimization and brand are equally addressed and represented at every stage.