Information Architecture tends to wrongly not get the attention it deserves during planning usually for its lack of immediate results. This is something that might take a lot longer to realise results from than for example implementing a link building campaign but rest assured for usability this is key. Users will appreciate the time taken to make sure that the structure that has been implemented is hierarchically correct for the information that is being portrayed to the user.
But just how important is information architecture? Where does it come on the list of priorities for the new site design and development? Most would argue that it is of less importance, but during the build process, the more knowledge that is gained in understanding how search engines interact with the content it is felt that its importance is under-estimated.
Not only will this investment in time and development help the user in terms of accessibility, but with search engine optimisation an established method of improving a websites performance it is felt that by truly understanding what a user wants to get from the content how else can content strategy and layout design be implemented?
Without a sound foundation provided by effective information architecture the site was likely to be less usable, accessible and less persuasive in its sales pitch. When the word accessible is used in these circumstances, that not only means user accessibility it also implies its crawlability by search engine spiders.
Search engine optimisation is not the dark art that many marketing professionals make it out to be. It is about ensuring that the websites are running at their optimum performance from each and every aspect that editors and users want to look at them; whether that is page views per visit, page loads times at server level (for a search engines eye view on this variable visit Google Webmaster Central), the quality of the content offering right through to how efficiently a users browser deals with the website. Webmaster central might suggest load times are long, resulting in crashing the user’s browser and that is something that’s not going to have a good effect on the platforms reputation.
The only way to gather user information is through testing or being able to analyse a product of service in the same market as is being developed. Even then if there are slight differences in what the user’s expectations are; what might be working for one website will not necessarily work for another. During the information architecture design on the Citys.info franchise a lot of time was spent understanding navigation trends on Mumbles.co.uk. Top line navigation paths that users were requesting were checked and analysed. Understanding if there was any content that was missing relied on the internal search queries used by visitors when browsing the website. Internal search is discussed in more depth later in the paper but is a vital step in understanding a market if the information is available.
Citys.info is developed with the theory in mind that content is king and structure and relevance is queen but both are required to get the best performance. Like with any publication having well structured content to take users on a journey through each section is going to help give them a good experience. The platform structure and content offering are developed for the user but always taking in to consideration how a search engine would deal with the same content offering.
