Well, my friend, I have just the tonic to cure your intranet ailments: rebuild your Information Architecture.

 

Information architecture (IA) is essential to a successful site. An IA provides the blueprint to follow before you dive in and pull your site together. It is the science of figuring out what you want your site to do, what information you want it to provide and how people are going navigate to that information. It is so important, that IA gurus join The Information Architecture Association to share in each other’s guru-ness.

 

But whether a guru or not, there are a few basic elements that all IAs should entail to make it the quintessential touchstone document for the development of a high performing intranet or website.

 

Whether the site in question is ultra-technical in nature – how to build a 747 aircraft class engine , or simple – how to boil water, you need to keep the language within the IA intuitive, straightforward and distinct.

 

The IA will be used by all your audiences: Project Managers, Content Providers, Techno-geeks, Site Architects, as well as layout Designers. Each one of these groups share the need for vast amounts of information about the site, but differ in the specific information they require and the terminology they will use to find it. An information architecture document with clear, consistent language and terminology is a critical first step for housing the information each audience segment requires and for determining how they will locate this information.

 

An IA should depict a conceptual structure and organization of a site’s content, and not be confused with a navigation map – which provides the full-blown navigational details of a site.

 

An IA provides an overview of the:

 

There are many options for how you can present your content to your site visitors: alphabetically, by subject area, and by author,– the possibilities are almost endless. So what is the best way to organize your data? It depends on such things as:

 

Once you have answered these questions, you are better able to determine the labelling language you will utilize – for both the IA and site, as well as what type of IA design to use.

 

There are several IA layouts to choose from. The following are a few examples.

IA Designs – Which one is right for you?

 

 

This approach works well for small sites with little content, and has the up-side of requiring very little maintenance.

 

A Flat Information Architecture structure is laid out so that all pages are presented as peers. With no parent-child relationships, each page can be accessed from every other page. This style is also known as a “monocline grouping.”

 

 

This design type is usually applied for sites with limited number of standard topics: Home, About Us, Products, etc….

 

 

This design is best suited for data that can be easily and logically organized, for example, alphabetically, such as a phone directory, or parts list.

When a site has a large amount of data to be indexed, a search based design is a better IA structure selection.

 

This is the design where protocols and permissions come into play. It is the most common choice for sites with a lot of content. With hierarchical designs, there are parent pages with multiple child pages for users to link to.

 

In a Strict Hierarchical design, access to lower level child pages is restricted through their parent pages.

 

This model is used where there is a direct and exclusive relationship between the parent and child pages that is not shared with the site’s other content. For example, a retail clothing site could organize its pages by product type – a shirt cannot be listed as part of the pants section.

 

This style is also commonly used for sites with message boards.

 

A Multidimensional Hierarchical IA design provides a site map where content can be accessed from various pages and methods or search patterns.

  

 

 

This IA design relies heavily on the properties or metadata of the site's content. An example of this would be Indigo where the user can find a book selection through various search options: title, author, ISBN/UPC, Editor and Publisher.

 

This might sound like a lot of work, and it is. But if you have content spread randomly across your site, you’re creating too much effort for your users. The ensuing phone calls are a symptom of a sick site, one that must be cured with a healthy IA.

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Cathy McKnight is a Business Consultant with Prescient Digital Media and specializes in the delivery of strategic web solutions. For more information on Prescient’s CMS Blueprint service, or for a free copy of the white paper “Finding ROI”, please contact us.