ARCHITECTURE AND NAVIGATION
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Visualizing the architecture
Once the main sections of the website are decided, it??™s a matter of fleshing out the subsections,
minor categories, and even individual pages if the site is small enough to allow
for that level of focus. At this stage, designers and information architects must critically
evaluate the content that will be present on the site, how it will be organized, and the best
structure to support all of the information.
There are different tools for visualizing the architecture of a website. Each presents the
data in a slightly different way. While a mind map encourages rapid, free associative thinking,
a more formal hierarchical diagram requires site designers to think about content in
a cascading path, or how visitors will naturally explore content if they don??™t bail out to a
search feature. Laying out the same information in a spreadsheet provides a third perspective
that requires a more decisive examination into actual content heuristics.
As a general gut check, maintain more than one version of the architecture. A mind map
approaches the structure from a user-centric point of view, allowing you to think about
how sections expand outward from the homepage.
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