Information Architecture & Content Strategy
Before you start to build, you need a blueprint.
You can’t just start building a house and putting paint on the walls without a solid plan. Where do the windows go? How many rooms are there? Which way do the doors swing? Websites are no different. That’s why we’ve always included a strategic sitemap at the start of our website projects.
Our expert strategist guides you through mapping the ideal structure for your content—menus, content relationships, and an outline of what content goes where. If you need a total reevaluation of your audiences and their needs, our website strategy and discovery service plans the content first, before we start to map it.
What’s Included
Intelligent Website Architecture
A strong website architecture helps visitors quickly access the content they want, while discovering other content and CTAs. Its secondary goals are to support SEO and accessibility. Information architecture does the initial work of planning user paths through the site, and a system of taxonomies that automate content relationships. Our website strategy service is ideal if you need help planning optimal content to get maximum results.
Preliminary Sitemap
We collaborate on the hierarchy for the site, navigation, and list of pages and subpages.
Full Sitemap
We expand the sitemap to include high-level lists of content per-page.
Content Strategy
We always recommend strategic per-page content for storytelling and conversions.
Taxonomies & Permalinks
We develop taxonomies to automate related content, and plan an SEO-friendly permalink structure.
You can redesign a site without a sitemap and a content plan, but we don’t recommend it. That’s like starting to build a house without a blueprint—it’s asking for trouble. For one-pagers or other microsites the risk is minimal, but for a professional business website that needs to compete in the search and AI landscapes, you can’t afford to ignore information architecture.
It’s not just about knowing which pages you need. It also includes auditing existing URLs, planning hierarchy and permalinks (important for SEO), planning content that will appeal to your target audience, ensuring that menus are intuitive and accessible, and strategizing paths through the website that expose users to the content that will get them to convert.
For the purpose of our projects, taxonomies are a WordPress functionality that empowers you to automate content relationships. Think of a project page that shows related projects at the bottom, a news article that recommends further reading, or a service page that shows related case studies, resources, and team members. The block that shows this content is programmed to pull any post types that match a set of custom filters within your control.
Planning taxonomies requires a strong understanding of your business goals, ideal user experiences, conversion optimization, and how WordPress works. We love nerding out over taxonomies. Learn more about them in our resource.
In our default project scope, our expert strategists will recommend a variety of content sections that we know will support general goals across most industries and niches. These include social proof, storytelling, CTAs, and proof of work. You’re the expert on your business, so you’ll know best which ones work for you (and which ones you can provide content for). We may also recommend new pages, usually during the sales process but also sometimes in the sitemap.
You may not need to have anything prepared for your project. But if you have a huge site, or if you need to rethink your content and drastically change the pages you have, this needs to be done before we start on the information architecture.
It can be done by your team—lots of clients come to us with a content audit and ideas—or you can engage us for our website strategy & discovery service. This is where we deep-dive into your audience, your goals, and your competitors, identifying content gaps and planning user flows. The outcome is a documented strategy to drive the website project.
No. Our strategists do content audits using a pure export of your site’s URLs from an SEO tool, and we create sitemaps from scratch using a design tool with no AI assistance.
Our Approach
What to Expect
Our focus is always on making the work that we do with you as straightforward and stress-free as possible. All of our services are driven by our hands-on, collaborative approach, led by our in-house team of experts. No jargon. No cookie-cutter strategies. We’ll be honest, transparent, and put your best interests first.
See How We WorkStart the conversation
Contact usOur Work
Information Architecture in Action
We provide sitemaps and content strategy for all of our projects! These are the latest.
“They were able to provide us with a website that went above and beyond our expectations, but still within our requested budget. After having a positive experience with them, we have continued to work with them on multiple other microsites, and the results have continued to be fantastic.”
Amanda Watkins, Manager Communications Strategy
Company Name
See How We Did ItOur Case Studies
We’re not in the business of hasty work to pay the bills. We put heart and craftsmanship into every project, and the results speak for themselves.
Start with a Free Discovery Call
No high pressure sales tactics. Just tell us what you need, and we can discuss options. We’ll be honest if we’re not a good fit.
"*" indicates required fields
In-House, Human Expertise
We’re Your Full-Service Partner
Websites don’t start with design and end with launch. We deliver custom service packages that cover every single step of your site’s lifecycle.