Posts Tagged ‘information architecture’

Planning the site layout and content distribution

Wednesday, July 18th, 2012

Here in this story I will discuss how to plan the website layout in real world. Of course we will keep the information architecture methodology into back of the mind. Lets discuss the parameters which should influence the design.

# Historical data : We need to analyze the present information architecture of the current website and see what search/check the logs from different analytics which information is most frequently accessed from your site. That shows the trend.

# User requirement : You need to understand the target audience and their requirement. More precisely, what they need from your site or what they are looking for at your site.  How the present structure helps them to find it easily. If not why? Keep yourself in the shoes of those targeted audience and try to search the items at your site.  Try to share the site to different end users. Find what they are facing.

# Get input from your team: One person may not be able to recollect everything, rather get all your key players together and get input from each. See how the website is reflecting their expertise to the outer world. You will definitely find you have missed out some important capabilities to mention on your site which your team can perform well. Rather your site is reflecting something which you do not do :-p

Site layout and content distribution

Site layout or information architecture

Now this is the time to plan on the structure of the site. Lets discuss it in another session.

- Jay

How information architecture helps building an intelligent site.

Saturday, July 14th, 2012

Information architecture is a science which enables the knowledge of putting right data on right place on your web pages. This is very important to show right data(it may be a piece of content, infographics, video) to right people. Sometime you will find sites full of data but very hard to find the data you are looking forL. You get lost there. Here comes information architecture. Few things you need to fulfill while designing the site and putting contents into it. They are..

# People should understand about the goal of the site at a glance.

# Once the idea about the site is established, finding next set of data should be easy. So you need to read the mind of the audience and need to understand what they will find next.

# Again, you should not be totally driven or influenced about what people finds next rather you need to drive traffic to the page where you want them to go. May be that page is most important for you, since you will make money from there! The target page varies from site to site. When you are trying to sell something, the product detail page may be very important while for a video subscription site will drive traffic to some interesting video to right audience. So you need to plan very diligently.

# Now the question is how you will decide what people will like to look in what position of your site? Here you need to understand your product/service very well and that will help you to take the decision. That will give you the power to understand who is your target audience.

# Here in Appsbee we help you to take those complex decisions. Sometime, if we think alone, you will find we are missing lot of things, rather an expert team can come up with many ideas who figures out the same for many sites for many decision makers. Lets work together to strategies your next site.

information architecture

I will keep writing about information architecture for different set of sites which cater in different area of services and products. It differs for each segment.

- Jay