Information Architecture

Let's take a look at what it takes to build a business website.

The product or service

Every business does something. It operates. This 'something', whether a product or service is an economy and every investment, whether the local rag, a website or a sign written van is aimed at driving people to buy or use the product or service.

The best way a website can do this is to be visible to the market. The first job is to research how this product is described and searched for by the market which leads us to:

Market profiling

We need to profile the market. Who is using our service? How did they find us? Is the market defined in any way such as gender, age, interests, skills or knowledge? Forming this picture gives us a better idea as to who to provide the content for. It's this message that we need to convey that is vital to the success of the capturing and conversion of a potential client or customer.

Website goals

The above two points leads us to the right message to convey and the right audience to target. So what do we do with these people? What are the goals of the website? Do we wish to initiate a communication such as phone or email? Fill in a form perhaps? Purchase a product?

Information architecture

These user actions are the end result of our market profiling and our content delivery.

So how do we convert browsers to buyers?

We optimise our websites to be search engine friendly. When the visitors arrive we convey the message in an clear, informative way that keeps the user reading. They digest the right kind of information first and foremost, most commonly features and benefits with further information beyond that if required. The 'call to actions' are present to them at that point in the website. These are usually contact or buy options and need to be contained within the scope of the area the visitor resides at that time.

Further analysis reveals we need to seperate information on the website to better understand the motives and actions of our users, for example, clearly listing the prices on the product or service page. We know the visitor has seen the price because we count the unique visits to this information. We also count how many people have visited the contact or basket pages. This gives us a better idea of the amount of people who have actually gone beyond the point of money and are looking for the action process. We then count the bottom line, sales. This gives us a clear indication of all three fundamental aspects of our website, capture, conversion, action, just by moving content around.

These are just basic ideas and need to be analysed for every business as each model is unique but you get the idea as to the importance of information architecture.

Technical specification

This is where you guys come in, the website developers/designers/optimisers. The above is a structure of action and information and it's your job to code to this structure as religously as possible using the best tools for the job.

And I haven't mentioned web standards once, apart from then of course.

Finally

It should be a given that websites are constructed using semantic markup with a strict document type, be accessible and usable. It should also be a given that the website is optimised for the market and search engines. It should also be a given that it looks attractive and the information is conveyed in a readable fashion that is appropriate for the market.

Now it doesn't matter how well you apply each discipline to a job, if there is no synergy between the three then the sites a failure, and there's plenty of them around.

The real skill is not how well you can write your HTML but how well your HTML can affect the bottom line, the business.