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Planning: Site Content - What to put on your site.

Before you choose the content for your Web site, review your site goals and your intended audience. What do you want to accomplish? Be sure you are able to match each piece of content to at least one of your site's goals. Reconsider including any information that does not further your goals. Effective planning will enable you to build a Web site that complements your existing business process.

Work through a three step process of:

• Gathering Data
• Testing and Analyzing Data
• Organizing Data

This process is called Information Architecture.

The purpose of Information Architecture is to declare audience type(s) and organize the content in a way that best fits the audience's expectations and terminology.

Effective Information Architecture ensures the ease of navigation and also begins a controlled vocabulary structure that can provide more accurate search results for users.

Gathering Data

• Begin by visiting with all levels of your office staff to determine what exactly people need when they contact your office.
• Pay special attention to your frontline staff, such as reception, help desk, etc. They are typically well in tune with your customers' requests.
• Use this information to help determine the needs of your target audience and your internal staff. (Perhaps your help desk would like to offer customers the opportunity to e-mail questions to them, to reduce phone calls.)
• If you would like to educate the public about your agency, consider including explanations, definitions or a glossary of terms specific to your business.
• If you have frequently requested forms, you might link them all on one page for easy access and downloads.
• Consider reserving a place on your home page for regularly updated content, such as news releases, relevant articles or events. This will show your visitors that your site is dynamic and fresh, plus it will keep visitors coming back to see new information.

Be flexible and willing to add or remove content as you reassess your audience's needs - your Web site will never really be "finished." The needs of your staff and audience will be the driving forces that influence your content changes, and you need to be receptive to them. Visitors to your Web site will be rewarded with a robust, dynamic tool to assist them.

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Testing and Analyzing Data

Once you start to gather your data, you can start to test and analyze that data to make sure it is presented in a well organized manner that makes sense to the user. There are many ways to test your content, listed below are a few testing methods that will help you develop a good organizational method.

Task Analysis

Understand your organization's current task process. Who is involved? How long does it take? Are there forms or added information involved that are out of your control? Break down the task and re-evaluate the steps involved. Can they change, be streamlined, become interactive?

Do this for all major "action oriented" items you want to incorporate onto your Web site or application. Pay attention to terminology. Will the user understand the same words and meanings that your internal staff does? Make note of these words, acronyms, etc. for user input later.

See also:

• Example of a task analysis

Card Sorting

Card sorting is a common usability technique to discover how users group items.

This enables Web designers to develop a structure that maximizes the probability of users locating the items they want.

Card sorting is easy to conduct and enables the Web designer to understand how "real users" are likely to group items. It also identifies items that are likely to be difficult to categorize and terminology that is likely to be misunderstood.

See also:

• Exercises - Card Sorting Overview
• Exercises - Card Sorting (Word 32k) | (PDF 24k)
• Online Articles - CardSorting
• Online Tool - Web Sort
• Online Tool - EZSort

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Organizing Data

Once you have gathered, tested and analyzed your data, all that is left is putting it in an order that makes sense. Use your testing results to develop an Application Flow.

Application Flow

An Application Flow is a visual or outlined display of the application's logic sequence (if this then that).

The purpose of an Application flow is to outline the decisions and expectations at each step on "what is to happen," "where it's to happen," "when it's to happen" and what the next step should/could be.

Creating an application flow helps all parties recognize the current requirements and solidify approval with minimal change time. It also provides a beneficial testing ground to capture critical user feedback prior to programming development.

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