The User Experience Blog for Website Architecture Planning

Planning and creating a website’s structure is not an easy job for a large website. There are some specific steps that should be followed. This article will provide you with the main steps to make sure that the website architecture achieves your client’s expectations.

The very first step is to make a plan during the discovery phase of the website development project. If you do not make a detailed plan then you will most likely end up with a scope creep, unpredicted increases to the project’s scope. They call it project creep because it often sneeks up on you and it is hard to get compensated for the extra work that did not go through the approval process. You will have no base on which to defend yourself against and could waste lots of your time and money. It will help you avoid possible disagreements about the final product; if you follow the plan that was accepted by the client, then it is much easier to finalize a project and get paid. 

A content inventory is the result and process of creating a comprehensive list of all content within a website. All website assets, regardless of their use should be accounted for and also where each is located. Your content inventory should also include an inventory of all links, internal and external and whether the link is good or bad.

A content inventory of all of your website assets will help you decide what type of analytic metrics are needed for a website content audit. If you do not know what type of content is on a website, it is impossible to know what to measure. For example, if a website contains embedded video, some great analytics data can be retrieved from 3rd party video websites like YouTube and Vimeo. 

In this article, we will discuss and explain how to do a website content audit, why this is very useful, and how a content analysis tool can decrease your time and effort. But we will start first by answering the question “What is a content audit?”

What is a website content audit?

A content audit is a process that includes looking at all the content (data) in the website or a marketing funnel and determining the strong and weak points of it in order to maximize the marketing activities. This process is sometimes confused with a content inventory, which is just a list of all items on your website. When done in an effective way, a great content audit will help answer questions about which parts of the site an audience likes more and dislikes as well. It will give clear insight on potential issues that must be fixed in order to enhance the productivity of your website.

A Sitemap is a list of pages containing URLs found within a website that is available to users and search engines in order to navigate through a website and aide the user in finding the content they are looking for. The two types of sitemaps that you should be concerned with are XML and HTML.

What are the differences between these two types of sitemaps?

HTML sitemaps are created and available for viewing by website visitors to help them navigate through a website. Usually, they are setup with a linear structure showing the hierarchy of the site from top level pages to lower level ones. They provide the user with a very easy to read outline of content, making their navigation to their desired content easier.

XML sitemaps are a little different from HTML sitemaps, because they are intended for search engines and spiders not website visitors. XML sitemaps can be visible with any web browser, but their main function is to provide the URLs of a website to search engines. They even show data on how often a page has been changed compared to other URLs on the same site. This information is very important for search engines because the more links they are provided with, the more a website will appear in search engine results.

What is a XML Sitemaps?

XML Site maps are documents that assist Google, Bing, and other search engines to understand a website’s content while looking through it for information users are looking for. Sitemaps are protocols that give the webmaster of a website the ability to inform search engines about the links of a website that can be viewed. Sitemaps give the permission to find every webpage to the engine that could otherwise be missed while indexing it.