Principles of good website hierarchy and page types

When we design products and services, one of the main aspects we must consider is how the information will be organised. This is commonly known as IA (Information Architecture).

Simply put, Information Architecture connects people to the content they’re looking for. The content could be text, a video or it could be a task a person needs to complete like applying for a passport. Good Information Architecture is in line with the mental models of the target users. It allows them to get to the content they need quickly and without error or confusion.

In our work at Nexer we must consider the big picture of a product or service. How does a journey we’re working on fit into the bigger digital system it lives within? And for some of our big projects, we design the Information Architecture from scratch. We design everything from taxonomies and tagging through to navigation and wayfinding.

In light of this, we’ve summarised some basic principles that have helped us when we think about hierarchy and standardising page types. It’s worth noting that this is just one aspect of Information Architecture and there is a lot more to it! But hopefully, there are some handy tips in here to get you started.

When we talk about hierarchy in Information Architecture, what we mean is the pages of the product or service and how they are arranged into levels. These levels when arranged and organised make up a site map.

There is always a starting point for your service or product; it is usually a homepage or dashboard and everything else branches off from here. We refer to these groups of pages that come from a homepage in levels. Level one being pages that appear immediately under your homepage, level two are pages once removed and so on and so fourth. Generally speaking each level leads to the other, with pages branching off from the level above.

A site map can be flat or deep. Flat site maps tend to not have many levels of pages, perhaps using level one and two pages only. Whereas a deep sitemap would have a lot of levels, perhaps going beyond even four levels of pages. There’s no right or wrong way and it is dependent on the service or product you are designing as to what is the right solution. However, one thing that we can apply some principles and standard to is the type of pages or page templates that work best at each level.

At level one, we expect to see mostly landing pages and sometimes administration or settings pages.

Level two pages are where your users should start to be able to find what they're looking for. This may come in the form of content pages, listing pages, and occasionally a transactional journey, which we'll cover in the level three and beyond section.

At level three and beyond, we use listing item pages which relate directly to listing pages and transactional journeys - both of which are important for users.

There are some scenarios not covered here. But, this summary of key page types provides a baseline to be able to get started and to structure your product or service. Applying a systematic approach to your product or service will provide the foundations needed as your product or service scales.

Get in touch if you’d like to learn more about how we can help you with your products or services at: 

hello@nexerdigital.com