Web Design Ethiopia

An architecture for your web site comes from taking all of your materials and organizing them into a structure that helps the user navigate efficiently. You’ll present this information in a site outline or diagram that is used to guide the development of the site.

You may also create detailed specifications for the content, navigation, and maintenance of the web site. All of this design work will be based on analysis of the site requirements, the patterns and relationships inherent in the content, and user testing.

Developing an Architecture
A typical process for developing an architecture is as follows:
1. Review prior art
Review the results of your requirements and task analyses. Review earlier versions of the site you’re developing and competitor sites. This develops a list of potential content pieces, candidate labels, and candidate organization schemes.

2. Evaluate your content
Identify content pieces for your site by reviewing what information you have available and what information your users need. Evaluate the quality and completeness of your content.

Specify, and design any content that is still needed. Create a content inventory, which specifies the complete list of content for the site and what pieces remain to be developed.

3. Create and evaluate your core structure
Brainstorm candidate content categories and site structures. Example structures are discussed in the next section on Organization Schemes.

Create an organization of your content based on information structure, task structure, user types, and card sorting. Decide which content pieces belong together on a page. User test and refine the organization of the base architecture.

This core structure should work well even before you’ve implemented helpful tools such as shortcuts and search engines.

4. Add shortcuts, redundant links, and supporting pages
Review your primary tasks and procedures and map them onto the site organization. Optimize the architecture to be efficient for the highest priority tasks. Review the primary user types and optimize for each of them.

Add appropriate shortcuts and redundant links. Add necessary support tools, such as Help, Site Map, and Search. If possible, implement this architecture into a barebones web site for user testing.

5. Develop and evaluate the navbar and orientation cues
Refine the layout and presentation of the navbar and orienting information, such as headers and page titles.

Establish final labels and graphics. Since the presentation of the navigation can have a strong effect on user’s mental maps and their ability to scan the options, user-test this version of the design when possible.

6. Create final design specs
Get client sign-off on the organization and labels. Create a final site outline or diagram, final content specs, design rationale, and maintenance specs.

7. Implement the architecture and verify its implementation
Build the web site and update the specifications as needed. Test that the site conforms to the specifications.

8. Train site-maintenance staff
Web sites quickly stray from a coherent structure as pages are added and removed. Train those who maintain the site to correctly interpret and apply the maintenance specs, so they know the standards for updating the site and testing those updates.

Report This Post