Information architecture is a core step when designing and developing a website. It enables the developer to figure out what is to be done and construct a blueprint of the actual website. Information architecture entails the definition of the goals of the site and shedding light on every important aspect. It also entails audience identification and classification. (Squishy 2010).
The present information architecture structure and visual design of the website has not been given consideration. This implies that the website has not focused on the requirement of different groups of audience. During the design and development process, the web content needs to be moved from the website to the institution’s content management system redesigned and re-architected to give more consistent experience to both staff and the prospective students (Rosen & Purinton 2004). The website creation project will be a continuous exercise which is intended to give a solid foundation which can be referenced any time the project is being upgraded.
The web creation process will adhere to agile system development life cycle. This implies that an agile project manager will be required to steer head the migration process. The design process will commence from groundwork where the project team is gathered in preparation for the site launch. The project team member will include but not limited to project managers, development team, design team, user experience, account t executive, network administrator and the copywriter. A legal officer will also move in to approve the website (Alshawi & Ingirige 2003).
The website should also provide the state of the user experience features. It has been a common faction that the user experience designer’s work is always ignored. In the process of designing a website and especially an institution website to internal hosting, user experience designer is one of the crucial project team members. The user interface design will constantly deal with the structure and wireframe of the site in a manner that will pose a great impact on the website’s design development and search engineer optimization (Baloglu & Pekcan 2006). Ensuring that the three teams have a copy of the user interface design draft will assist the three teams in future stages.
The website content should be created in an appropriate manner to ensure that the users did not experience any difficulty. The content creation or the copywriter is also a very important facet of the website creation project. A content plan for a website is compulsory. Some developers may thing that they will just copy the content of the old website to the new website. This is not the case since a complete and detailed audit of the content entails the involvement of corporate branding and web analytic. The project manager should ensure that the individuals tasked with this responsibility are given the chance to specify the duration of their work. The time they need should be in line with the overall project duration so that a proper business decision can be made based on the quantity and the quality by integrating the facts from all the project team members (Cyr & Bonanni 2005). In addition, the time needed for all the graphics such as videos and audios should be added re-skinned and modified. Moreover, content audit of the website is also carried out. Content audit is also very crucial when designing the architecture of the website. It may be necessary to remove some pages which existed in the previous website. The following criteria can be used to sieve the content of the existing website to be migrated. Checking if there has been any visit to that particular page, checking if there are external links toward the page, checking whether its content is being shared in the social media, checking a replica of the content that does better. One or more of the point above will give you the most appropriate guideline to the choosing the page to be deleted.
References
Rosen, D. E., & Purinton, E. (2004). Website design: Viewing the web as a cognitive landscape. Journal of Business Research, 57(7), 787-794.
Baloglu, S., & Pekcan, Y. A. (2006). The website design and Internet site marketing practices of upscale and luxury hotels in Turkey. Tourism Management, 27(1), 171-176.
Cyr, D., & Bonanni, C. (2005). Gender and website design in e-business. International Journal of Electronic Business, 3(6), 565-582.
Alshawi, M., & Ingirige, B. (2003). Web-enabled project management: an emerging paradigm in construction. Automation in construction, 12(4), 349-364.
Squishy. (2010).Information Architecture Tutorial. Retrieved from http://www.webmonkey.com/2010/02/information_architecture_tutorial/
