Seasoned web developers will know that it is important to spend a significant amount of time in the beginning of a project to understand a client's website and business needs thoroughly. An example of this would be to start by systematically mapping out the information architecture of the client's website visually. Though this process is time-consuming and sometimes rigorous and intense, it will easily return its value many times over. Here you will find detailed information on mapping out the information architecture of a website and also a different tactics to explain why mapping is useful from the perspective of SEO (search engine optimization).

DYNO Mapper has many features to use in the content planning phase of designing a website. This makes it easy to manage your workflow and gather the content that is necessary. Using the tools available, DYNO Mapper makes it easy to plan, discover, and execute a new content strategy whether it is a medium or large website that you are redesigning. These tools enable you to plan the website from the ground up while staying extremely organized. You become capable of distributing content assignments to your team members while making sure that they meet their milestones and other due dates. You can create content blocks made of plain text, rich text, images, links, files, and videos—while ensuring that they are contained seamlessly in the site map. Team members may be assigned pages and their progress can be tracked with the content calendar. The files may then be exported for easy content planning in PDF and CSV formats.

Often, information architecture is confused for many things. Sometimes it is used interchangeably with website navigation, technical architecture, and more. Doing this is not only misleading, but it is absolutely incorrect. These misconceptions are part of the reason that information architecture may be overlooked in the website design process. In fact, IA is one of the most vital parts of the process, and should take place before many of the other steps. It means organizing, prioritizing, labeling, and connecting website content so that it is easy to use and easy to find. To condense it even further, it is sometimes called the science and art of organizing websites. It is the time when context, content, and users all overlap.

Performing content audits is an essential part of maintaining a website, but you cannot just jump right in and perform an audit. There are several important things that need to happen prior to starting the audit. Because some websites actually have thousands upon thousands of pages with their own text, images, applications, and documents, it is almost impossible to manually audit any website's content. Before even thinking of that, you will need to perform a content inventory. This will organize all of the information on the website into a format that will be easier to read and manipulate.

Everyone is talking about good website design, but do you know what it actually means? Do you know how to tell if your own web design is working? Do you know what to look for? Without having a clear metric for measuring the quality, it is hard to recognize the quality. There is more to a successful website than simply looking nice or being able to function. Ideally, a successful website would be built with a specific strategy in mind, it is focused on usability so that visitors can navigate the website with success, it incorporates a style that is pleasing to the user's eye, it is filled with content that is relevant to the users, and it is optimized for search engines. Keeping that in mind, these are a few of the key aspects of a strong website design, complemented with some questions that you may ask yourself when measuring the quality of your website.