mary goals. This can be done by tastefully positioning and/or highlighting content or links so they stand out.

Design the website to attract and support the target audience:

Many managers and management teams try to add their personal touch to a website because they want to express how they see the business to The World. This will confuse everyone accept the manager who personalized the site. The trick is to build the site around the target audience. Every demographic uses the Web differently and this must be accounted for while designing a site. Men and women are drawn to different colors, children are far more technical than their grandparents, and teenagers have far different schedules than their parents. There are hundreds of style, personality and preference combinations that make up any demographic; t

I live in the city of San Francisco and I have a short commute to the office every morning. My wife and I share a car so I usually use my motorcycle to get around during the week. This makes my commute every day pretty quick; that is until the clutch broke on my Ducati. Not wanting to make the hour-long bus trip across the city, I decided to give my bicycle a try. I figured this would be a great opportunity to take advantage of the nice weather and put a daily workout into my busy schedule. San Francisco's relatively small 7 by 7 mile area is situated on 43 hills, which add a bit of a challenge into a bicyclist's route. If you head out to Pacific Heights or Telegraph Hill in North Beach you will find streets steep enough to make you feel like you're doing a back flip. In the middle of my regular three-mile, cross-city commute route is a moderate hill and although it didn't seem like a big deal with an engine doing the effort, believe me the manual climb on a single-speed bicycle made me want to hail a cab in either direction. So the potential health benefits and enjoyment were quickly outweighed by the required effort; all because of one hill.

After the first couple of days I knew this was going to be a problem. I started looking for a topographic map of San Francisco to plan the optimal route for each direction of the commute. I soon realized that I'm not the first person to encounter such a challenge; I found a bicycle map online showing the hill grades of most streets. Using this resource, I was quickly able to find the optimum route and gladly regress to my athletic mediocrity. For the remainder of the month, while I was commuting on my bicycle, I used my newly planned shortcut to easily travel between my home and office.

Right about now you may be asking yourself, "What does this have to do with marketing?" Imagine the commute destination is an actual set of business goals you have online, and the San Francisco hills are the challenges your customers encounter during their "commute" on your website. Doesn't it make sense to find the quickest and easiest route for them? Wouldn't that allow more customers to make a successful trip? Without taking time to strategize and plan around the goals associated with a website, it's easy to create a number of obstacles that will frustrate, confuse, and anger your audience.

Information Architecture is a crucial planning step in website development. As we all know, "If you fail to plan, you can plan to fail". Nowhere is this more accurate than in the constantly evolving and highly competitive field of online marketing. The following is a list of common mistakes and suggested solutions (or at least things to keep in mind) in conceptualizing the information architecture of a website.

Tips

Make the goal or purpose of the website obvious on the home page:

Just like an effective advertising campaign, a good website must provide an obvious call to action. This means that your audience should be able to navigate intuitively even if they have never been to your website or heard of your company. Your website should have one or two primary goals. The entire site should funnel visitors into the channels associated with these goals to ensure visitors don't become confused or frustrated before accomplishing at least one of the primary goals. This can be done by tastefully positioning and/or highlighting content or links so they stand out.

Design the website to attract and support the target audience:

Many managers and management teams try to add their personal touch to a website because they want to express how they see the business to The World. This will confuse everyone accept the manager who personalized the site. The trick is to build the site around the target audience. Every demographic uses the Web differently and this must be accounted for while designing a site. Men and women are drawn to different colors, children are far more technical than their grandparents, and teenagers have far different schedules than their parents. There are hundreds of style, personality and preference combinations that make up any demographic; th

moderate hill and although it didn't seem like a big deal with an engine doing the effort, believe me the manual climb on a single-speed bicycle made me want to hail a cab in either direction. So the potential health benefits and enjoyment were quickly outweighed by the required effort; all because of one hill.

After the first couple of days I knew this was going to be a problem. I started looking for a topographic map of San Francisco to plan the optimal route for each direction of the commute. I soon realized that I'm not the first person to encounter such a challenge; I found a bicycle map online showing the hill grades of most streets. Using this resource, I was quickly able to find the optimum route and gladly regress to my athletic mediocrity. For the remainder of the month, while I was commuting on my bicycle, I used my newly planned shortcut to easily travel between my home and office.

Right about now you may be asking yourself, "What does this have to do with marketing?" Imagine the commute destination is an actual set of business goals you have online, and the San Francisco hills are the challenges your customers encounter during their "commute" on your website. Doesn't it make sense to find the quickest and easiest route for them? Wouldn't that allow more customers to make a successful trip? Without taking time to strategize and plan around the goals associated with a website, it's easy to create a number of obstacles that will frustrate, confuse, and anger your audience.

Information Architecture is a crucial planning step in website development. As we all know, "If you fail to plan, you can plan to fail". Nowhere is this more accurate than in the constantly evolving and highly competitive field of online marketing. The following is a list of common mistakes and suggested solutions (or at least things to keep in mind) in conceptualizing the information architecture of a website.

Tips

Make the goal or purpose of the website obvious on the home page:

Just like an effective advertising campaign, a good website must provide an obvious call to action. This means that your audience should be able to navigate intuitively even if they have never been to your website or heard of your company. Your website should have one or two primary goals. The entire site should funnel visitors into the channels associated with these goals to ensure visitors don't become confused or frustrated before accomplishing at least one of the primary goals. This can be done by tastefully positioning and/or highlighting content or links so they stand out.

Design the website to attract and support the target audience:

Many managers and management teams try to add their personal touch to a website because they want to express how they see the business to The World. This will confuse everyone accept the manager who personalized the site. The trick is to build the site around the target audience. Every demographic uses the Web differently and this must be accounted for while designing a site. Men and women are drawn to different colors, children are far more technical than their grandparents, and teenagers have far different schedules than their parents. There are hundreds of style, personality and preference combinations that make up any demographic; t

ly planned shortcut to easily travel between my home and office.

Right about now you may be asking yourself, "What does this have to do with marketing?" Imagine the commute destination is an actual set of business goals you have online, and the San Francisco hills are the challenges your customers encounter during their "commute" on your website. Doesn't it make sense to find the quickest and easiest route for them? Wouldn't that allow more customers to make a successful trip? Without taking time to strategize and plan around the goals associated with a website, it's easy to create a number of obstacles that will frustrate, confuse, and anger your audience.

Information Architecture is a crucial planning step in website development. As we all know, "If you fail to plan, you can plan to fail". Nowhere is this more accurate than in the constantly evolving and highly competitive field of online marketing. The following is a list of common mistakes and suggested solutions (or at least things to keep in mind) in conceptualizing the information architecture of a website.

Tips

Make the goal or purpose of the website obvious on the home page:

Just like an effective advertising campaign, a good website must provide an obvious call to action. This means that your audience should be able to navigate intuitively even if they have never been to your website or heard of your company. Your website should have one or two primary goals. The entire site should funnel visitors into the channels associated with these goals to ensure visitors don't become confused or frustrated before accomplishing at least one of the primary goals. This can be done by tastefully positioning and/or highlighting content or links so they stand out.

Design the website to attract and support the target audience:

Many managers and management teams try to add their personal touch to a website because they want to express how they see the business to The World. This will confuse everyone accept the manager who personalized the site. The trick is to build the site around the target audience. Every demographic uses the Web differently and this must be accounted for while designing a site. Men and women are drawn to different colors, children are far more technical than their grandparents, and teenagers have far different schedules than their parents. There are hundreds of style, personality and preference combinations that make up any demographic; t

in the constantly evolving and highly competitive field of online marketing. The following is a list of common mistakes and suggested solutions (or at least things to keep in mind) in conceptualizing the information architecture of a website.

Tips

Make the goal or purpose of the website obvious on the home page:

Just like an effective advertising campaign, a good website must provide an obvious call to action. This means that your audience should be able to navigate intuitively even if they have never been to your website or heard of your company. Your website should have one or two primary goals. The entire site should funnel visitors into the channels associated with these goals to ensure visitors don't become confused or frustrated before accomplishing at least one of the primary goals. This can be done by tastefully positioning and/or highlighting content or links so they stand out.

Design the website to attract and support the target audience:

Many managers and management teams try to add their personal touch to a website because they want to express how they see the business to The World. This will confuse everyone accept the manager who personalized the site. The trick is to build the site around the target audience. Every demographic uses the Web differently and this must be accounted for while designing a site. Men and women are drawn to different colors, children are far more technical than their grandparents, and teenagers have far different schedules than their parents. There are hundreds of style, personality and preference combinations that make up any demographic; t

mary goals. This can be done by tastefully positioning and/or highlighting content or links so they stand out.

Design the website to attract and support the target audience:

Many managers and management teams try to add their personal touch to a website because they want to express how they see the business to The World. This will confuse everyone accept the manager who personalized the site. The trick is to build the site around the target audience. Every demographic uses the Web differently and this must be accounted for while designing a site. Men and women are drawn to different colors, children are far more technical than their grandparents, and teenagers have far different schedules than their parents. There are hundreds of style, personality and preference combinations that make up any demographic; these are the factors that should be used to determine the basis of a website's architecture.

Use fewer words to attract the audience and communicate a message:

Designing a website is like telling a story. A good story teller will give a brief summary of a story, highlight all the key points and then provide a conclusion. Then if someone in the audience is interested in a specific topic they can ask for more detail. The links within a website allow the audience to inquire further about a specific topic. So avoid saying too much up front, this will save the audience time and keep more visitors on the website longer. The trick is using bullet points on the home page while saving prose to elaborate within support pages behind the home page.

Provide blank space throughout each webpage:

The human eye is naturally drawn to open space while scanning and reading. Uncluttered space gives our eyes a chance to relax and reset before continuing to focus on words and pictures. A website that is littered with content and images is naturally offensive and will immediately overwhelm even the most determined visitor.

Flatten a website around the primary goals and functions:

Flattening a website refers to minimizing the number of clicks or levels available before you run out of supporting links. A given website can be set up in an infinite number of ways including vertical links/pages (supporting links/pages) and horizontal links/pages (parallel links/pages). To use the story telling simile above, horizontal links and pages represent topics while vertical links and pages represent questions. With that said, your website should provide access to the key information and functions within vertically shallow pages. In fact, the best websites will have the key information and functions easily accessible right on the home page.

Creating the proper Information Architecture can prove to be time consuming and tedious, yet ultimately very rewarding. Time alone won't do the trick either; proper execution requires a certain skill set, online business acumen, and experience. This is one of the biggest factors between a firm that can create a pretty online brochure and one that can create a powerful online sales engine for your business. You should pay special attention to this when choosing a high quality web development firm to help you. This isn't always immediately affordable to all business, so next month we'll describe how to create a marketing budget.