Simple Site Architecture
When you’re developing a simple site with under 15 pages and one level of navigation, it’s a fairly straightforward process to create your architecture. If you have a lot of content in a more sophisticated site, start with the straightforward process, but you may want to use 304 – Sophisticated Site Architecture instead. Your goal is to help users quickly find what they’re looking for. If you only create standard vague sections like “Products” and “Services”, you force the user to dig around to find the most relevant items. If you’ve designed the site around your user who is a small business owner, create a section called “Small Business Solutions” (accessible from the home page) and highlight only those things that are relevant. Use 311-‐E to create your architecture. Here’s the process you’ll use: EXERCISE YOU’LL STEP TASK STATUS USE 1 Enter the master list of content you created in 307– 302-‐A Complete Develop Your Content. 2 Create a list of sections that you think your site 311-‐B Complete should contain. 3 Assign the content to the sections you’ve created; 311-‐D Complete revise the sections to make sure the content fits neatly and intuitively. Your goal is to get users right to the info they need. 4 Break the content into individual pages and name the 311-‐E Complete pages. 5 Provide the architecture sheet and the list of 311-‐F Complete individual pages to your copywriter, designer, programmer, etc. If you have trouble during the process, look at your competitors’ sites and how they are organized for ideas.
If search traffic is important to you, the sheets will encourage you to use keywords in the section and page names whenever possible. The URL string is important to search engine rankings, and a generic URL such as www.yoururl.com/services means nothing to a spider. However, if “tax software” is a keyword, www.yoururl.com/tax_software is a great URL that can help your SEO efforts.
Websites Simple Site Architecture
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