Published: 12 March 2018
In a society where appearance is highly important, it’s difficult to keep the focus away from just the look and feel of our website. The industry has a tendency to place all the focus on this aspect and shifts focus from the strategic thinking behind the idea. This is where information architecture or AI comes into place. Despite being a concept that has been talked about for over a decade, is one of the few concepts that continue to be relevant and crucial in modern marketing.
Customer behaviour is changing drastically year to year. With continuous advances in technology, customers are increasingly leaning on the practicalities of these technologies and substantially becoming lazier when interacting. Interactions start and end with just scrolling through a feed, selecting top results when searching for something on platforms such as Google, following one-click purchases etc. Due to this drastic change, it is important to design our website strategically as we can no longer rely on our customers to do what we want them to do. This is where IA comes in.
Firstly, businesses need to understand what their customers want to achieve from the visit and from there, their needs need to be levelled in a hierarchy of importance to the customer and the business. Content design is also a very important aspect when using AI. AI identifies the customer’s needs and wants, from here, businesses need to manage the content within the website with this information at its core. Content must not be overwhelming and must be designed in a way that each topic is easily navigated with the right links. Visitors to the website need to be alluded to go where we want them to go and once they are there, businesses need to make sure they add clear calls to action to achieve the end goal, whether that is them gathering the right information or purchasing a product or a service. This is when through AI we lead the visitor from reading the content to making an interaction.
Despite the outstanding benefits of AI, this can be strongly compromised by the content management system behind the website. CMSs, such as WordPress, only allow limited flexibility and content is most often created inappropriately due to use of a template. Our design manager Jade Cummings comments:
“At Why Media we use MODX as our predominant CMS system, this helps us create bespoke websites with customer journey at the core of our designs. It’s all about clever design and not just about a beautiful design”
If you wish to discuss this with us, please email Claire White at claire@whymedia.com. Let’s Collaborate!
Why Media is an award-winning design, marketing, digital communications and PR agency offering tailored solutions to companies on a global scale. We have extensive experience in delivering design and marketing services to a spectrum of companies, including professional services, property companies, financial institutions and shopping centres. We have offices in London UK, Hertford UK, Finestrat, Spain & Brescia, Italy.
Marketing Contact
Name: Claire White
E-Mail: claire@whymedia.com
Telephone: 020 3007 6002
