Information Architecture

Has your website become hard to navigate? Do you have too many pages that don't seem to belong anywhere?

Do visitors complain that your site is confusing?

Do you want to make sure your site can expand to accommodate your future needs?

I have years of experience with exactly these problems.

One of my greatest strengths is the ability to look at a large amount of disorganized material and find organizing principles so it can be arranged in a sensible way. In particular, I can help answer all of the following for your website:

If you have many documents you need to put on the web, what's the best way to organize them? How many web pages should they become? How should a site visitor navigate between them? How should they be organized for easy maintenance? Where would they fit best into the existing hierarchy on your site?

What's the best way to indicate to the a visitor (coming from a search engine, say) where they are in your site and how to get to the page they really wanted with the smallest number of hops?

If your site has outgrown its design; if your existing hierarchy of content doesn't fit your needs any more; if you want to plan for your site's future growth, contact me.

Example:

CSTB.org: When I was brought in to improve the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board's site, there were about 60 pages without much in the way of an organizing principle and a home page which didn't give much information to the casual visitor about what was available within.

After analyzing the existing content, I:

created a new hierarchy for the site clearly split into Publications, Projects, About and News; added a People section to provide information about the people behind the studies;
added accent graphics throughout the site to help indicate what major section one is browsing in the site's hierarchy;
added site toolbars to the bottom of every page so visitors don't have to scroll back to the top to move around; and
exposed material from the most important section of the site on the home page so the new visitor can immediately see what CSTB has just produced.

Once all that was in place, it made sense to add pages for all the older publications since there was a logical place for them (and they are still available, many with free online versions). I created several different indices for the publications, including a cover gallery spanning over two decades.

With the addition of new projects, archival material, announcements and more, the site has grown to over 250 pages, each in a logical location and easily findable within one to three clicks from the home page.

Interested? Contact me about your needs:

Steve Bogart
consulting@nowthis.com
703-850-7807

Suite 120, PMB 255
5810 Kingstowne Center Parkway
Alexandria, VA 22315

Résumé
References available upon request