Datasheet

This hierarchical categorization can easily be taken too far. Many sites fall into the trap of over-classifying
their content, creating so many different tiers that users are unable to quickly access the content that’s
most vital to them. More often than not, these too-complex navigation structures arise from a lack of plan-
ning when thinking about a site’s IA. The impulse to put the book somewhere, anywhere on the shelf
becomes more important than placing it in an intelligent location, where others might easily locate it.
As tempting as it might be to organize your content beneath 12 levels of deeply nested navigation, that
kind of information architecture is more a hindrance than a help to your users. This is another area in
which our personas can help us, and enable us to reign in our impulse to over-classify. If we consider
what language would be helpful to “Frank” to find a specific section of our site, or which categories
make the most sense to “Natalie,” then we can frame our IA work around our users’ needs and goals.
While planning your site’s information architecture (and, in fact, throughout every stage of your pro-
ject), it’s important to keep your users’ needs at the forefront of your mind. Paying attention to them
now will only ensure their satisfaction later.
Building Our Site Map
Now that we’ve established the different high-level categories of our site, we can finally complete the orga-
nization process with a site map. A site map is a graphical, high-level overview that shows the title of each
page or section in a Web site in a visually digestible, logical hierarchy (and if you can say that five times
fast, we’ll have to give you a gold star). The site map is the culmination of our IA work to date. It takes the
content inventory we assembled, and organizes the content therein into a logical, navigable hierarchy.
As shown in Figure 1-5, every page and section of the site is listed and named in the site map, with
“stacks” of pages to represent a group of related pages. We don’t need to display every page in our Articles
section, so we can easily group them through this notation. If we remember the content hierarchy diagram
from before, then we can see exactly how this high-level tree structure drives the navigation for our site.
There are three main navigation sections (Learn, About, or Contribute) and each page of our site has been
placed within one of these sections. This means that from the home page, our users will most likely need to
browse into one of these content areas before being able to navigate to one of the pages below.
Furthermore, we’ve relegated some pages to an area of “global navigation,” which is accessible from
every page of the site. These pages don’t specifically fit within the bounds of our site’s three main con-
tent areas, but are considered to be more universally relevant (that is, no matter which page of the site
the user is currently reading, this information could potentially be relevant). If we were reading a
WebMag 5000 article and wanted to know about what options (if any) that we would have in reprinting
it, we could easily select Copyright from the global navigation and find licensing info therein.
Alternatively, while we may not be able to navigate directly from the site’s colophon to Writing Tips in
one click, both pages would allow users to access the accessibility statement directly.
There are a number of applications with which you can build your site maps. Designers often rely heavily
on such applications as Adobe Photoshop or Illustrator; others might rely on more IA-specific graphing
tools, such as Microsoft Visio (
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/FX010857981033.aspx)
or OmniGroup’s OmniGraffle (
www.omnigroup.com/applications/omnigraffle/). Some IA
professionals build all their deliverables in HTML, while others swear by their trusty pencil and paper.
Try out a number of different tools, and settle on one that best meets your needs.
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