Website Architecture Analysis

Website architecture combines elements of design and development to produce sites that look and function exactly as required. To understand what makes for good website architecture, the site's aesthetics, content, database and code structure all need to be examined. This comprehensive approach needs to be well thought out, taking into account speed of access, ease of use, browser compatibility, search engine rankings and online conversions.

The overall aesthetic structure of a website should be consistent throughout. The principles of visual communication are varied, but it is important to note that the graphical elements of a website need to be balanced carefully. This means that design elements need to be arranged carefully. Website designers aim to balance aspects of contrast and proportion with the aim of guiding the viewer's eye to the important parts of a page. Visitors will become frustrated if they cannot see through a plethora of banners, garish colours or a brew of mismatched print types. Harmonisation of the website's aesthetics will create a more pleasing and professional effect.

The most important foundation in website architecture is associated with how information is accessed by the user. Visitors to the website will be looking for the most important or relevant information. And they want to get to it quickly. Deciding whether to make a purchase from an online shop, might, for some customers, be wholly dependent on delivery times. They need to see this information as soon as possible in the shopping process; they should not be expected to backtrack through previously read pages. Worse still is the absence of this type of information until they've signed up with the company in question. It's not logical to restrict important information, neither is it conducive to successful conversion rates.

Presentation of the business is the same whether it's a shopfront or a website. How the website represents a business says an awful lot about the people behind that business. It has the capacity to engage visitors and persuade them to stay, in much the same way as a physical shopfront has. Pages which say something about the company need to be kept separate from the pages which list products or talk about news and so on. Navigation of these pages should be intuitive, simple, logical and easy to follow.

With only 20% of all material published online being indexed by search engines it is important that your pages are created correctly then found and indexed by the search engines easily. Analysing how the website could be better formulated and constructed to this end is crucial for generating traffic to the site. Any barriers to indexing with its architecture should be addressed.

Where applicable, a website's database also needs a logical architecture. Website data is typically stored in tables of information, each with its own set of records. These tables may contain data about pages, news stories, pictures or site usage, for example, but they are all collections of organised data that power the way the website works and interacts with visitors.

Without code such as HTML, CSS, Javascript and PHP (for example), which can be used to establish the rules for converting, structuring and representing information in the browser, there would be no website. Photographs, video and text are all encoded through these languages and the architecture of the site's underlying code (the structuring of specific classes, functions and scripts) also needs to be analysed and managed carefully.

The development of a business' online presence demands maximum input from day 1, resulting in an optimal website architecture.