What is content architecture and why is it important?
Content architecture or information architecture involves the combination of organizing, labeling, search, and navigation systems within websites and Intranets in order to improve findability and usability.
Good content architecture allows visitors to focus on their tasks,by logically grouping the content and making it easily navigable. In addition, it also minimizes the effort involved in searching, sorting, and filtering information. Information architecture addresses several aspects of content strategy and takes care of these aspects.
Importance of content architecture
Imagine that you are shopping for a laptop and you come across a model which has its touchpad placed behind the screen. You will have a hard time using this laptop because you are not used to it, and you will definitely prefer buying a laptop with it’s touchpad in it’s normal position. Similarly, visitors expect certain types of data in certain areas of the website they are visiting and if they do not find it there, they will have a bad user experience.
It is quite likely that there are several other businesses out there, providing similar products and services just like you. If your website does not have a good content architecture and the website of your competitor does,customers would obviously choose the latter. Hence, it is necessary to get your content architecture fixed immediately in order to get the competitive edge.
Creating good content architecture
Improving information architecture in an existing website could sometimes be simple and could be easily fixed in an hour or so, but in some cases it could even require an overall reconstruction of the website.So, setting up a new website with a good content architecture is always simpler than modifying it in an up and running website.
In the case of an existing website, the best thing to do is to get feedback from the users themselves. Users can give you their honest opinion about the difficulties they face in understanding and navigating through your website.
Zyxware will be happy to provide you the much needed content architecture support. Zyxware also provides guidance on whether you should restructure your website, modify the existing system to evolve into a new format, or go for a complete site overhaul. Please contact us for further information.
