Planning A New Website: Information Architecture
One of the most overlooked aspects of creating an online project is the information architecture. By this, we just mean the way information is categorized and organized on a website.
The larger a website is meant to be, the more critical it is to get information architecture right. Otherwise, changes that don’t lend themselves to the original structure will take days, weeks, maybe even months to re-organize. The use of tags or other semantic indicators can be very helpful in matching together related information.
One site that we’re working to develop right now is called College Crunch. This site is meant to be a comprehensive guide to college planning and college life. Because there are so many possibilities with the broad topic of “college” our biggest challenge has been choosing a limited set of top level categories to organize all the content under.
What we’ve chosen to do is break the site into 9 categories that we feel encompass almost all possible college topics:
Category 1: College Life
This is the catch all category for miscellaneous topics. It’s always good to have a well defined miscellaneous category.
Category 2: Career Planning
Since most people start off their college planning by first planning out a career, we felt that any college site should have a thorough section for that critical first step. These days, most students choose their degrees based on the career they have in mind, and not vice versa.
Category 3: Degree Options
After choosing a career, it is important to choose a degree that prepares you for the career. Notice how strongly related category 2 and 3 are. In this case, we’ll want to define relations between careers and related degrees so that the user can easily move between the two categories to find the next logical piece of information.
Category 4: School Profiles
Most students like to match up their desired career with a school that offers degrees for that career. Again, there is a tight relation between category 4 with 2 & 3. Setting this site up properly will require that we structure the information in such a way that we don’t duplicate work, but rather point visitors to the additional information in the related categories.
Category 5: College Finance
Unlike categories 2, 3 and 4, category 5 is somewhat independent. We’ll clearly want to drive visitors to this section, but since we don’t plan to have financial aid information specific to each college, but rather generic financial aid information, there is no obvious informational relation that we need to define between category 5 and the other categories.
And now on to some of the minor categories…
Category 6: Test Prep
In my view, the test prep category is currently one of the more debatable high-level categories. Why? Because it seems like a minor topic that might fit better under a category like “College Applications” or “Applying To College” - but neither of those topics seem ideal. So as you can see, information architecture is riddled with complications and doesn’t always present clear choices.
Category 7: Books & Supplies
Obviously textbooks are huge part of college. At this point it is not clear whether we need to create a database of books and supplies related to specific careers, degrees and disciplines or whether we just provide generic textbook resources. This is a major decision that will have to be balanced with other, possibly more important structural considerations.
Category 8: GED & High School Diplomas
Since a high school education is required for a college education, many prospective college students are faced with the task of first getting their high school diploma.
Category 9: The College Crunch Gazette
Since this is a college site, what better way to theme the site than with it’s own “college newspaper” style publication. The College Crunch Gazette will be a more informal section of the site with commentary, tips and even some fun stuff (college has to be fun, right?) From time to time, the Gazette might highlight content elsewhere on the site.