Site Architecture & User Interface Design
"If something is hard to use, I just don't use it as much."
| - Steve Krug's Wife |
This quote comes from the wife of the author of one of our favorite books, Don't Make Me Think, A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability by Steve Krug. While Jakob Nielsen is considered by many to be the father of web usability, Mr. Krug's book is easier to read, short enough to read on a flight from St. Louis to Orlando, and full of pictures. As such, it is the one that our client's tend to prefer.
The reality is that there is no right or wrong way to create the architecture and user navigation for a site, but if your site is going to contain more than a couple dozen pages, how you organize the content will be important. Not only does this content organization affect usability, but the manner in which a search engine bot spiders through your site, reads your links, and assigns link popularity scores is tied to your site architecture and user interface.
The way in which pages are built in our Empoweren content manager practically ensures that one will have a decent user interface. However, for sites with a large number of pages and/or very aggressive SEO goals, getting some help with the design of the site architecture can be worthwhile.
Captiva's SEO and web design specialists can help you prioritize your pages and create a site map that will ensure clean navigation and the proper use of inbound and outbound link text while minimizing link popularity drifting issues.
Sample Preliminary Site Map
Once we start building a site out, we typically move to using spreadsheets so that we can monitor all SEO related attributes and keep projects moving along their timelines.