A good thing to think about when you’re thinking about your website is the site architecture. This ties into our previous posts’ 3 Key Pieces to Understand About Websites and Goals!
So what exactly is website architecture?
It’s the blueprint for your website. What the navigation is, the key pieces of the layout, and figuring this out will help inform what technology you’ll need to get the desired results that you’re looking for online. Most of the time these things fall into similar buckets but your website architecture should 100% be based on your business strategy and objectives.
For instance, when you look at this website:
- We have our homepage and it gives people a general overview of who we are.
- Services is our next page, and that is the meat of our site because people need to know what we can help them with. More can be done with this section but we’ll touch on that another time.
- Next is our About page and I debate the value of About pages and whether or not that information should be included on the homepage. I guess they are good for context so people understand why an organization or person is doing what they do and why they are qualified.
- Advice & Ideas is our blog. I always prefer to name blogs instead of calling them blogs so people know what they are getting.
- The Contact page speaks for itself, but these all vary slightly depending on whether you have physical locations, etc.
Ultimately you can build your site however you feel fits your business best. Generally, we recommend sticking to some traditional norms but the beauty of you having your website is you can test things and adjust all of the time and see what works for you and your brand. Just make sure you put some thought into things so you can grow in ways that are valuable to you and your organization.