Structuring your website

Okay, let’s get some jargon out of the way. Information architecture is the art of organising and structuring information in a logical way which balances both the ease with which users can find the information they are looking for, and your desire to communicate a message to them. This works in two main contexts; firstly the naming and ordering of the pages which comprise your site with an architecture tree (just like a directory tree on your computer), and secondly how the content is ordered with each page. As was observed in the section entitled “Bottom-up or Top-down” in the previous section of this guide (If you haven’t read “Your target audience” yet, it’s definitely worth a look), these two needs often work at odds to one-another, so it’s definitely worth making sure you are clear as to the approach you want to take.

But don’t worry. One of the great things about Django Church, is that very little is ever set in stone. The structure of your pages, what you call them and where they appear in the site’s architecture tree, can all by controlled and changed as required. In practice what this means is that you will have the flexibility to try different structures and organisations over time. If a page isn’t working in a particular location, no worries, with a few clicks, you can move it to where-ever it needs to appear. The same applies to you your content, Django Church gives you the ability to edit the content on each page of your website, enabling you to develop and refine it over time.

Tip: Buy some post-it notes

This is typically how we start to structure a site…

  1. Buy post-it notes. Lots of them. Branded, unbranded, any colour, any shape. Knock yourself out!
  2. Find a space with an empty wall and a table.
  3. One sheet at a time, write an area of content you need to contain within your website. Common areas of content for church websites might be…
    1. Vision
    2. Mission
    3. Services
    4. Staff or Team
    5. Contact details
    6. Keep going...
  4. As you write them, stick the post-its on the wall. It doesn’t matter for now what order you put them in, or whether they are structured, just get them on the wall.
  5. There are new daft ideas here. It’s better to capture everything and represent it on the wall, than to dismiss it and forget about it. There’ll be plenty of time to trash redundant content areas later.
  6. At the point where you start running out of ideas, take a step back from the wall and try to get a feel for the bigger picture.
  7. Where there’s a common theme or an obvious relationship between post-its, move them and group them together.
  8. You might find that as connections are made, more ideas spring up. Make sure you capture those too and put them on the wall.
  9. As those groups of post-its grow, start to think about what you might call those groupings. Ask yourself two questions… 1. In one or two words, what would I call this so that members of the Church would know what it is? 2. In one or two words, What would I call this so that people outside the Church would know what it is?
  10. If the answer to those question are the same, then great. If they are different, make sure you capture both. Put your answers on a post-it and stick it above the group that it referes to. It might be worth using a different colour post-it or pen so you can identify these grouping labels.
  11. Aim to have as few groups as possible, but not so few that you can’t give each group a name that clearly identifies what it contains.
  12. Slightly more tricky, assign each group a number where number 1 is the most important area of the site to your target audience, number 2 is the second-most important, and so on.
  13. Once you’re happy, take a photograph of your wall to document it. This way, you can refer back to it without elements being lost. It also means you have the option to start from scratch, laying out the post-its in a different fashion to explore alternate structures.

And you’re done! That’s your architecture. The group names represent your primary, or ‘top level’ navigation, and all the notes beneath represent secondary pages within.