Frank Schulte-Ladbeck

Giving a site focus is vital to the user and it can help them hear your message.

How big will your website be? With a blog, where you are creating posts regularly, the articles that you upload need to categorized for people to find them. Imagine going into a library, and you know that you want to find a book on marketing for your small business. If all the books were arranged only by the date that they were published, you will not be able to find those books unless you sift through everything. By title or by author? Same problem continues, so libraries organize by category. However, some readers may want the latest published work, some a specific author, and some may know a title. There has to be a method to finding the post that the user wants. This is where the concept of information architecture comes into play. It is how content and data is structured on your site.

Even if you have only a few pages, and you are not adding posts, you still need to think about where information is placed. Sure you could save space by not creating another page and jamming content on the same page. For example, you decide to be kind to your customers by having a resources page on your site. Let us say that you are a landscaping firm, and you want your customers to know about the best places to find plants, seeds, fertilizers, and maybe even some lawncare equipment. You would also want them to contact you. Since you are a resource for them, you decide to put your contact information at the bottom of this page. We have two problems with this setup. First, the resource page is meant as a place where your customers can find services or content which is not coming from you. They will not look for your contact data there. Next we have a situation peculiar to how a web page is viewed. The user may not scroll down the list of links that you provided, so they never see your contact data. We want important content that we want to be seen to be placed “above the fold”. This expression means any data visible to the user when your page loads in a browser. Mainly this would be the header area.

Exploring this concept of “above the fold” can be a bit trickier than you might think. How your page loads can depend on the browser (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera, Safari, or other) and the version of that browser (IE6 or IE8 load differently). Generally it is safe to say that the entire header will be above the fold. You will notice in the header of this site, I have my name and my phone number. Above the header I have my page navigation, so fixed content is quickly found. The latest published would be in the archives, while posts from a certain topic are listed in the category section. These are placed in the sidebars, because a user on a specific quest will look for them a bit more than a casual visitor. At this time, I am the only author, so I do not have an author’s page.

Hopefully you are thinking about how to organize your content, and at this point you should consider what content you will have on your site. If you go with a blog format, you may feel the need to post often. You may hit upon a topic that you are passionate about, but it has nothing to do with your business. For example, I knew that part of my readership at yourhoustonhomeinspector.com where other industry professionals. After having written a few articles about marketing and techniques for improving a website, I began to receive many inquiries on the topic, which inspired me to write posts about what I was doing. In my mind, that blog site was for experimentation, and I was happy to share to have these readers come back. These posts distracted other users though. My business was home inspections, so a possible client would come to this site expecting to find a post on that topic, but they are reading about how to create a survey on the web. I lost their interest. That is why I dedicated this site to my love of websites, while focusing on home inspections on the other site. This can happen on any site when you do not consider the focus of your content. Your small business has a focus, but the drive to create content may lead you away from that core idea.

Write down twenty aspects of your business. Can they each be a category or a fixed page? Could these be organized into a set of five to ten category items? These questions help to start shaping the structure of content on your site. You may want to write a list of twenty pieces of information that your clients should have. Where will this data go on your site. Can some be grouped together? This will be the beginning of your pages.

This post will start you on your way, but this topic needs more attention. I will give examples on other posts which will detail ideas expressed here. This step has to be done before you start your website. Having a clear vision of what you want to share helps your customer navigate your site, winning them over to you.

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