Case study: Information architecture and content strategy
Rearchitecting a large news site
In my role as lead information architect and UX designer, I worked with a content director, a visual designer, and front and back end developers to redesign and rebuild a news site that was bursting at the seams.
Problem
The client outgrew their news website.
Users couldn’t find what they wanted.
No up-to-date content management system meant maintenance was laborious.
The site no longer told a coherent story about the company’s mission.
The site was not responsive.
Approach
Develop a content strategy and information architecture to reflect the company’s mission.
Inventory and assess existing content.
Provide new page templates and a fresh design.
Build the new site on a modern CMS.
Users
The client did not have a research budget, and their requirements were largely around creating the site they wanted to present to the world. Still, I interviewed stakeholders and looked at competitor sites to get what insight I could into how people would use the site.
Content strategy
The content director and I ultimately identified four main categories of content:
Explanations of mission and core values
Articles and resources that reflected those values
Initiatives that grew out of core values
News about the company
The site’s architecture and content strategy grew from the relationships among those four categories of content. (The names of the categories evolved throughout the project.)
Demonstration of the relationships among content on the site
Initial concept of article page
Article pages would link dynamically to related topics from all categories
Information architecture and page templates
Once the top level structure was in place, I developed more detailed sitemaps, page templates, and the basic navigation structure.
I then worked with the developers to implement the architecture and content types in the new CMS, and with the visual designer to bring the pages to life.
