Content Architecture.
Everything needs a home; even your content. And without structure, it is just a great pile of information. A mess where no-one can find anything and nothing has context or importance.
We’ve all got one; a small draw or a large cupboard, a place where we throw random possessions that don’t have a home. You know where they are because they’re yours and you put them there, but would anyone else?
Fine, so strangers aren’t likely to rootle around your draws any time soon. But they will your content, and you might not be around when they want to find something.
Without structure, content is just a mess. No-one can find what they want and place any value on it. Simply stacking it up to keep it tidy doesn’t help either. Your content needs rules and values.
Grouping.
Think of your content in the same way a supermarket does its products:
- A tin of bins in the canned goods isle
- A crumpet in the breaded isle
- An apple with the fruit and veg
- Washing power amongst the cleaning products.
Your content needs similar structure. Can you imagine the carnage if a supermarket opened their doors and threw products randomly on shelves! It would be a complete nightmare where very few customers would go away happy.
Grouping content uses a certain amount of perceived logic. Apples could be listed amongst the breakfast cereal, but they’re not because we know most people would look under fresh fruit and vegetables to find them.
A good way to make initial sense of the mass of content is to apply some simple labels to each piece. For example, give it a value, a one-word description of what it is (news, review, feature, comment). And add context to this with a genre (music, politics, football). It’ll help start to build common themes.
Structure.
With content initially outlined, it needs some structure to give it context. A visitor should be able to start off with a broad theme or term and narrow their selection until they find what they’re looking for. For example:
- someone looking to buy a rugby ball would go to sports > rugby > equipment.
- someone looking to study fashion would go to courses > arts > fashion,
You can use menus to guide people to your content. It’s important to consider how content is labeled so visitors can logically walk a clear path to get to their desired destination.
Unfortunately, at times menus will fail. Where they do, cross-linking can help ‘bump’ people back on track. Logic can sometimes be determined differently (apples for breakfast), so by trying to determine any possible ambiguities and cross-liking is helpful.
Hierarchy.
For most websites, even small ones, it’s not always possible to display all the content options on one landing page – like the homepage. This would resemble a directory rather than what you’re most probably after.
Instead, you want to promote and link to specific pages, content that is higher profile or more relevant. For a sales website, this may be the newest products or sale items, for a news website it may be the latest news stories, and for a service website it may be the most requested services.
Hierarchy is used to rank pages higher up or lower down the pecking order. The pages with a high hierarchy should be promoted most, and those lower down the least. The methods of determining your hierarchy can be drawn from the data shown in your analytics data, or for news organisations, the editorial process.
Wireframing.
Before getting stuck in producing pages, it’s often easier to remain away from software and use simpler means to determine how a page should be constructed – with a pen and paper.
Wireframes are a simple, basic outline taking the content available and suitably positioning it. They help give a page context and hierarchy which might otherwise be overlooked.
Wireframes should be ‘task focused‘, adding the popular aspect to the top of a page, working down from there. Analytics data can be used to help inform decisions so you know precisely what your audiences want, so you don’t have to guess.
Often, content wireframes will have to fit inside an existing page template imposed by a website’s overall design. This is usually perfectly fine and doesn’t cause huge problems, but where it does, you should speak to your designer.
