Organising your site

Your website should be organised based on what people are looking for and expect to find, rather than how your organisation is structured. So you need to start with learning about your audience and what they need.

How you organise a website is often called information architecture (IA). Your IA is the foundation on which you can start creating your content.

Learning about your users

For a successful website, you need to find out what your users want to know or what they need to do.

Your audience will also have ‘mental models’ of how they expect a website to work. Find out about mental models and how they inform website design standards from Nielsen Norman Group.

Sometimes websites contain content that’s more focused on what the organisation wants to say than what the user needs to know. This makes content difficult to understand and act on.

To learn about users, you could:

• review existing evidence (for example, analytics, search logs, call centre data, previous research reports)
• interview and observe actual or likely users
• talk to people inside and outside your organisation who work with actual or likely users (for example, caseworkers or call centre agents)

Avoid focussing on what people say they’d like to see, and instead explore what makes them say that. Then look for patterns and trends across what multiple people tell you.

Treat any opinions or suggestions that do not come from users as assumptions that have to be tested by doing further research.

The government Service Manual has more guidance on learning about users and their needs.

Once you understand and have documented your users’ needs, you can start to think about what content you’ll need to meet those needs. You can start by grouping content based around the tasks they are trying to complete.

Categorising information

Content audit

If you have an existing website, you might want to start by doing a content audit. This can start to give you the full picture of:

• exactly how much content (web pages) you have
• what format it’s in (including things like document attachments, videos, images, other functionality)
• if it’s meeting its intended purpose
• if it’s out of date
• if you think it’s still going to be needed on your new site

Nielsen Norman Group has a content inventory and audit template you can download.

Although an audit can be a good place to start, it’s only one piece of the puzzle. A new website is a chance to start afresh and make sure you’re really meeting the needs of your audience, and get rid of what’s not needed.

Grouping content

To decide how a website should be organised, you need to group content and label it, ensuring it makes sense to your users. You should test as often as you can along the way. Using a technique called card sorting can help identify categories that feel natural to the people who will use your site. Find out about using card sorting for better IA from Nielsen Norman Group.

You don’t want to duplicate content in different areas of the site. Duplicated content produces poor search results, confuses the user and damages the credibility of your organisation. It also makes it difficult for you to keep up to date.

Navigation

You need to think about the paths people might take to find the information they need. Use labels that reflect the language and terms that your audience would use.

You want to avoid any duplication or routes where people could get lost.

Website Builder allows you to have 2 levels of navigation (often called primary and secondary) in the header across the top of the webpage. You need to add items to this manually. Find out more about creating your navigation menus.

When you’ve planned your site sections and structure, you’ll be ready to start creating content. You should test with users as you go.

Homepage

Your homepage is important for giving a good overall impression of your site, but also remember that many users will never see it. They may go straight to a specific page from a search engine result or a direct link.

You shouldn’t pack your homepage with information to make up for a site that’s difficult to navigate. Focus on clarity and usability.

Some of the main features you could include on your homepage are:

• a simple, impactful headline that tells users exactly what the organisation does or offers, or what the site is for
• a brief introduction or highlights, explaining a bit more about the purpose of the organisation or website offering
• the most important call to action that guides users to a next step – such as ‘Apply now’, ‘Register’, or ‘View the latest report’
• featured services or the most important information from your organisation that you know most people will be looking for
• latest news, alerts or important (for the audience) updates

See homepage examples on Website Builder sites

Other website pages

You should come up with a content plan that lists all of the pages you think you’ll need. Decide what format each page should be and what functionality it will need. Always bearing in mind what it is the user needs to do or understand.

Consistency between sections and pages will help your website be usable and look professional and trustworthy. Find out more about designing your site.

Testing with users

You should plan to test with users at different stages of your website design and build.

When you have a clear understanding of your users’ needs, you can begin to test your design and content that’s been created with those needs in mind.

You could do this by:

• testing small sections of the website at a time – give a user access to the content and observe how they interact with it, asking questions to understand what they’re thinking. Does the user understand the content in a way you were expecting? Is there anything that’s unclear or missing?
• asking a user to describe what they see when they look at the website – first impressions are important and may determine whether or not the user stays on the website:
  • explore the user’s feelings about the layout of the site and any images that have been included
  • ask if anything is standing out in particular – what first catches their attention?
  • pay attention to see if they miss anything – most users will only skim information so you want to understand which bits they miss
  • pay particular attention to information at the top and bottom of a page as users will often ignore these
• testing your IA by setting the user a task and observing the process they go through – for example, you could ask them to find a certain piece of information on the website. Observe them closely and try not to help. Do they go straight to the information or is there any uncertainty? Ask the user to think aloud

When testing, you’re interested in what the user is doing and thinking and also how it makes them feel. For example, do you observe frustration when the user tries to find something?

Analyse what you observe and use these findings to help make design decisions that will improve your website content.

Find out more about different types of user research in the Service Manual