Information architecture focuses on designing effective navigation, organization, labeling, and search systems.
It is a very important steps in a web design process. Users can feel lost even in a relatively small information space that is not well organized. For example, if you allow people arrive at any given webpage from any other page on the web, i.e. they may not always enter the site from the homepage, user may get lost and do not know how to get access to the information that he/she wants to go. To avoid this problems,the following steps should be taken in coming up with an architecture:
1. Finding out why people will come to your site.
2. Determining the goals of the site in different stages.
3. Compiling a list of requirements
4. Collecting content and doing inventory
5. Determining the organizational structure of the website
6. Creating the outline such as site maps and content maps
7. Creating a visual blueprint of the site
8. Defining the navigation systems
The above steps is the minimum sets and should not be skipped. They are important and should be considered within a web design/re-design process as good information architecture lays the foundation upon which a website is built.
Besides, I would like to introduce you a good page from the University of Minnesota Duluth. It talks about the Information Architecture related to web design issue. The most wonderful part is that it shows hundred references related to the topic.
http://www.d.umn.edu/itss/support/Training/Online/webdesign/architecture.html
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