Architecture of a web site explained

We are in the throes of an information explosion; we are all susceptible to information overload. The challenge today is not in collecting information our world already has more information than it knows what to do with rather, it’s making that onslaught of information findable. The cacophony of data available on the web has both enhanced and frustrated our ability to find what we need. We’ve all Googled a phrase only to have thousands of web sites show up on the results pages. How do we sort out which pages have value to us, and which don’t? We can, and should, sort out the structure of our own web site so that the information it contains is findable.

Information architecture refers to the organization, labeling, and presentation of data in any context, from the appearance of a graph in a corporate newsletter, to the format of a recipe in a cookbook, to the organization of a card catalog in a library. The main tasks of information architecture are categorizing, labeling, and organizing fragments of information in such a way that humans can comprehend the framework and use it to retrieve the desired fragments. The whole point of information architecture is to manage complexity, which means to render it usable by making its structure visible.

In the physical world, a well-designed building is no accident. If it’s strong, functional, easy to navigate, and aesthetically pleasing, it’s because an architect put a lot of thought and effort into discovering the user’s needs and designing the building to fulfi ll those needs. Similarly, in the web world, a strong, functional, and aesthetically pleasing web site is the result of thoughtful information architecture. For the purposes of this article, we will narrow our terminology to site architecture the organization and navigation of information within a web site.

Site architecture is a fuzzy blend of information architecture and interaction design. It involves:

- The content, or the fragments of information, buried in the site.

- The relationship of individual fragments to one another; that is, the logical structure that ties those fragments together in a way that intuitively makes sense to visitors.

- The navigation that visitors use to traverse the logical structure.

Site architecture is the glue that holds the entire site together. Because a site must grow and change along with the evolution of business needs, the site architecture must be scalable and fl exible.

Notice that we haven’t mentioned visual design yet. Site architecture is how the mind views the information, while visual design is how the eye sees it. Visual design is important, obviously, and we will examine that in the articles to come, but it can be implemented only after the site architecture is defined. Function must come before form; site architecture is the framework on which the visual elements hang.

An ironic reality of site architecture is that the simpler, the more obvious, and the more elegant the site navigation appears to the visitor, the messier, more complicated, less obvious, and more diffi cult the site architecture probably was to construct. Essentially, our purpose as designers is to absorb complexity and render it simple so that visitors don’t see it or feel it. We expend huge amounts of effort, skill, understanding of human needs, and (don’t forget) common sense to transform complexity into apparent simplicity, all in order to deliver the simple version back to our visitors in a highly palatable form. The more straightforward the navigation is for the user, the more work it probably took for us to craft. Let’s begin the whole process by looking fi rst at how we go about labeling and logically categorizing the content on our site, just as a library categorizes its books by topic.