Creating easy-to-navigate sites, better search rankings, lower costs & happy customers
through the professional practice of
information organization, labeling systems, navigation and search models
THE ROLE OF INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE IN WEBSITE & WEB APPLICATION DEVELOPMENT
Information models provide a blueprint for large websites. Web designers, graphics designers, programmers, content writers, marketing managers and strategists rely on these architectural models to maintain a coordinated view of the system under development.
High level navigation maps and user flows improve the clarity of the business specification by providing visual aids that support the business strategy - useful for marketing managers, graphic designers and programmers alike, in addition to the business client.
During development and acceptance testing, communication between team members is facilitated with detailed navigation maps, labeling systems to assure consistent terminology, use cases & interaction scenarios, activity diagrams for interdependent processes across actors and detailed functional specifications for interactive web applications.
BENEFITS OF INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE
Applying Information Architecture practices to your website or web application ensures a pleasant visitor experience and has been shown to increase the visitor-to-prospect-to-customer ratios.
Search engine rankings are improved by easy-to-navigate sites that have consistent, appropriately named labels and links. A well-architected site also saves future development costs by anticipating growth areas of the site and designing placeholders into the model early.
INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE CONSULTING SERVICES
Professional Information Architecture consulting services are available to businesses, large and small.
My information architecture consulting work and experience includes -
- Web-enabled payroll system using Visual Studio, VB .Net and SQLServer. Responsible for business use case analysis, functional specifications & diagrams, storyboarding, acceptance testing and user training. Served as lead engineer in meetings with client and programming team.
- A collaborative intranet website with artifacts of UML and use case analysis, MSCs, ERDs, data models, simulations, prototypes, test results, bug tracking notes, project plans and project management schedules & coordinated site content.
Detailed site model and functional specifications for the development of an interactive online game for a new nutritional supplement product promotion. Worked with marketing manager to translate the business requirements to functional specifications and navigation maps for the graphics designers, game programmers and content writer.- A multi-national team intranet website providing access to online software tools, user manuals, process documents and developer tips sheets. Managed site content with a hybrid navigation model - pull-down alphabetic menus and a topical directory listing - linked to over 60 distributed websites and serving 150 engineers in 3 countries.
- A new navigation model and labeling system improved the visitor-to-buyer ratio for a jewelry ecommerce website.
- Wireframes and navigation models for several major company website redesigns.
- Detailed functional specifications for a recipe administration web application and the recipe search system for the online recipe library of a popular nutritional substitute.
My professional education and expertise includes practical knowledge of user interface principles, color theory and the complete software lifecycle working in software architecture, data modeling, programming, website design and software test throughout the U.S. and Europe. Learn more about how I incorporate information architecture principles in building small business web sites here.
For more information on Information Architecture services, contact me, Suzanne Engels, via the WebArtNTech contact form or or by phone (732)991 4381.