Step 2: Decide on Website Content Needs and Organization

In this step, you will be deciding on your site’s information architecture, navigation and starting to strategize what content you will need and how to optimize it for SEO.

Throughout this process, you will need to make sure you are accounting for all content your site needs to include and making sure that it has a logical structure that will make sense to your target audience.

UX Strategies

There are several UX strategies that you can use to help identify your site’s content needs, including:

• Interviews or surveys of stakeholders or target audience
• Personas
• Keyword analysis
• Card sorting

Using these strategies, you can start answering these questions:

• Is every piece of content needed to meet our business objectives and our target audience’s needs accounted for?
• Is there a logical place (page) for each piece of content to live on the site?
• Are pages of content grouped together in a logical way that would make sense to your target audience?
• Are related pages in the same “group” in your IA (impacts sidebar navigation)
• Do you have short, logical labels for groups of content?
• Are the most important sections of content represented in your navigation?

Results

Before moving on to step 3, you should have:

• A list of all pages of content you need to make
• A diagram or other visual representation of your sitemap
• A list of primary navigation items