How do you Plan and Market Your Site?
Building a site is only part of the process to establish a presence
online. You need to plan how you intend to get visitors to your site.
Will you rely on natural search engine indexation, run a paid search
campaign or rely on other forms of advertising? If you are counting on
getting traffic through natural search engine optimisation you will need
to carefully plan your architecture and to include relevant keywords.
Be aware that new sites can take up to 6 months to get rankings in the
Google index, so have realistic expectations.
Building the
Web Site Architecture
Once you have carefully worked through the planning steps you should
have a good understanding of what your site needs to meet your business
objectives and your target audience requirements. The next step is to map
out your plan. Depending on your business objectives and budget there are
a number of different options and approaches.
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Small Business Investment - If you have a small budget then you may wish to develop the architecture yourself or work with the person who will be writing the content.
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Medium Investment - Prepare a creative brief for your web design agency that includes Information Architecture as part of your web project solutions.
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Large Investment - Where Information Architecture and Usability are core to the business mode and return on investment, the services of a specialist consulting firm should be engaged.
Small Business Planning
Your Own Architecture
When you are going to plan your own site, do some research on the
different types of site structures and find the one that will suit you.
It is important to understand the different relevance of hierarchy. The
general rule is to place the most important information at the top of the
hierarchy and therefore at the top of navigation systems. Where information
has the same value than other methods such as search tools and browsing
may be incorporated. Remember search engines index pages as individual
pages, so people may enter your site at pages further down the hierarchy.
The following example is a standard hierarchy structure:
Learn more about Web Site Architecture structures at Web Design From Scratch.
