Read the following excerpt from my book ‘The NZ Small Business Superhero’s Marketing Handbook’ and discover how information architecture can help make your website easy to navigate…
A simple way to achieve this is to bear two things in mind:
- Structure your website for your perfect prospect.
- Use navigational conventions so users don’t have to think.
When someone says they want their site to be “easy for people to find what they are looking for”, the first question needs to be “which people?” The key to creating a website that is “easy to use” is to anticipate the information that your perfect prospect will require before they feel confident and comfortable to respond to one of your calls to action. When structuring your website, you need to think in terms of the “levels”of information that your perfect prospect needs. The first level of information consists of the main categories that your prospect has in mind, and these in turn break down into second and third level categories. The first task is to work out your level one pages. These are the pages in the main navigation menu such as in this example from Shoe Clinic:
- Home
- About
- Sport Shoes & Apparel
- Buy Accessories
- Prizes & Rewards
- Columns & Info
- Contact
You will see the top level of the Shoe Clinic navigation menu includes three “must-haves”: Home, About and Contact. Because web users are used to seeing these pages and understand their purpose, it makes sense to use these labels (or About Us , and Contact Us ). It also makes sense to position these pages in places that users are likely to expect, meaning the About Us page will be straight after Home, and Contact Us will be at the end of your level one pages. So a good starting point in working out your level one pages is:
- Home
- About Us
- Contact Us
Ideally you shouldn’t have more than eight to ten top level pages, certainly not more than 15. Any more than this you should be looking to group pages in categories and use the category name as the top level page.
Now, on the basis of what would be most useful for your perfect prospect, fill in numbers three to eight above. Your top level navigation buttons should also include one or more of your main calls to action, which in Shoe Clinic’s case is “Buy Accessories”. Shoe Clinic’s other main calls to actions (ie signing up to the email database and liking their Facebook page) are included in the left hand panel of most content pages. After you have sorted out your level one pages, consider your level two and three pages. As a general rule you shouldn’t go more than three levels deep, so your content is as accessible as possible. In the following example from Shoe Clinic, the level one page is About , under which are 10 level two pages. Under one of these pages: Store Locator, there are 16 level three pages.
The level one buttons should identify the main categories your prospect is looking for. Once they have found your level one button, the level two buttons under it should expand on the theme and logically lead them to the information they seek – on their terms. In this way you can build up a framework of your proposed website structure.
To read more, you can purchase my book ‘The NZ Small Business Superhero’s Internet Marketing Handbook’ by clicking here.
