On information architecture for small sites

Most information architecture writing is about large sites. The canonical examples are e-commerce catalogues, government portals, news organisations with twenty years of archived articles. The IA challenge in these cases is real: lots of content, many audiences, deep hierarchies, a hundred ways to reach the same page.

The IA challenge on a small site, which is what most of the studio’s clients have, is different and rarely discussed.

A small site usually has somewhere between five and thirty pages. The pages are mostly findable from the top-level navigation. The depth never exceeds two clicks. The IA, in the formal sense, is almost trivial.

What is not trivial, on small sites, is the order in which the pages appear and the choices the user is asked to make on each. This is the small-site IA problem and it deserves more attention than the field gives it.

A few specific decisions that matter on small sites.

The order of the navigation. A five-item navigation is read left to right (or top to bottom, in vertical layouts). The first item carries more weight than the last. Most small-business sites put items in the order the company thought of them, or in the order the company mentions them in conversation. The order on the page should be the order the user wants them.

The cleanest test: ask three people in the audience, “if you visited this company’s site, which of these would you click first?” The order of frequency in the answers is the right navigation order. Most clients who run this test discover that “About” is not first, “Services” is not always second, and the page they considered most important is somewhere in the middle.

The depth of the home page. Small sites tend to either underfill the home page (too sparse, the user has no idea what the company does) or overfill it (too dense, the user cannot tell which thing matters). The right depth is, as a rough rule, enough that the user can decide whether to engage further within ten seconds, and no more.

A useful exercise: write down, in ten seconds, what the company does, who it is for, and what the visitor should do next. The home page should communicate at least the first two of these in roughly the same time. If it does not, the home page is too dense or too vague.

The first paragraph on every other page. On a small site, every page is a potential landing page from search. The user might arrive on the About page first. They might arrive on the FAQ first. The first paragraph on every page has to do enough orientation that the user knows where they are, even if they have not visited the home page.

Most small-business sites have first paragraphs that assume the user knows what the company is. The user does not. Write each first paragraph as if it were the only thing the user is going to read.

The internal links. On a small site with no formal IA, the internal links are the IA. Pages that should be related need to link to each other in the body copy, not just from the menu. A blog post that mentions a service should link to the service page. The service page should link to relevant blog posts. The about page should link to the team page. The contact page should link to the FAQ.

Most small-business sites have almost no internal links between pages. The result is a site that reads as a stack of pages rather than as a connected document. Adding internal links is the cheapest IA improvement small-site owners can make.

The single book on this that has been most useful to me is How to Make Sense of Any Mess by Abby Covert. It is written for IA on any scale, but the principles map cleanly to small sites in a way that the larger-scale IA literature does not.

For card-sort testing, OptimalSort is the cleanest tool the studio uses. The companion pieces on site architecture is not navigation and three pages I keep redesigning cover the related conversations. Information Architecture for the Web and Beyond by Rosenfeld, Morville, and Arango is the longer reference for projects where the small-site rules do not apply.

The IA on a small site is, in the end, a question of writing rather than of structure. The structure is short enough to be obvious. The writing is what carries the weight.