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InformationArchiTECH Archives - 11/2005

Put simply: an information architect is a person who designs a website in such a way that any information it contains will be impossible to miss by anyone who is looking for it.

The information may be about a product or service, or it may be completely educational in nature.

For our purposes, when we say "anyone who is looking for it," we do not necessarily mean a person who has already found the website. The person may not even know the website exists. We presume that such a person will begin his/her search by using a search engine, such as Google, Yahoo, or MSN.

A website that is properly designed by an information architect will blend seamlessly with these results, becoming a virtual extension of the search engine itself. The purpose is not to drive traffic to your site "no matter what." A truly skilled information architect will design a structure that naturally attracts those whose desires match the information you offer, no matter how narrow or broad your target audience.

Once the target user finds your website, however, the job of the information architect has just begun. Suppose, for example, you offer thousands of products. The user inevitibly has a particular thing in mind--a single product, a particular service, or an answer to a single question. There are plenty of fish in the sea, as they say. The attention span of the modern web surfer will not last for more than a few clicks before moving on in search clearer waters.

The information architect will consider the various paths by which a user might enter the site, and plan in advance what sort of organization should be delivered the moment he/she "walks in the door." Ideally, you want the person to be given precisely what he/she was looking for. Even if this can be ensured in the majority of cases, however, one must design various alternate paths by which the information can be quickly found moving from that point forward.

This is often described as a website's internal navigation. Keyterm searches, navigation bars, footers and even the link to the home page should be designed by the information architect in such a way that the user immediately recognizes a logical structure. While it is important to minimize the number of "clicks" a user will need to make before finding the information he/she was looking for, it is just important to instill a sense of confidence that there is an coherent structure to the information. The more clearly the user understands the structure itself, the more likely the user is to stay for as long as necessary.

An information architect, therefore, oversees the construction of all possible pathways between you and the person that is searching for the information that you have. An information architect's craft is best demonstrated on a project the he/she has overseen from start to finish. However, this is not realistic in many cases. Oftentimes a website is already in place, with a devoted clientele and numerous inbound links, which simply needs a refining of its internal navigational structure, or a reorganization of its content in such a way as to optimize the number of relevant users finding the site through search engines. In this case, the information architect must put his/her best skills to work in building new structures where needed, while still keeping the previous structures intact.

Informationarchitech can do all this and more. Click here to request a quote.