It’s In The Cards
Organizing the information about your business, products and services is a great first step towards designing the structure of your web site. This is a simple and quick exercise that will allow you to begin to visualize categories of information beyond the typical cookie-cutter categories used by everyone else. All it requires of you is an investment of time, index cards, and your knowledge about your business.
For example, your business sells either a product or a service – sometimes both. Do you really want a section of your web site labeled “Products” or “Services?” If you’re in the water treatment business, then “Filtration Devices” would be more meaningful to your site visitors and would enhance your search engine results.
Enough about the “why,” let’s talk about the “how.” We devised an index card template that will print on Avery 5388 blank index cards. Download your Veracity Card Sorting template and print off a few to begin.
You should have copies of all of your brochures, product sheets, press releases, etc. with you as you begin. This will help you avoid the need to get up and retrieve information as you progress. The goal is to look at each of your communication items and write down a high level overview containing the following:
- Description of the product/service – What particular product/service are you selling?
- Source of information – Brochure, press release, flyer
- Category – Think broadly. You’ll narrow this down in a later exercise.
- Priority – How important is this product or service to your business?
- Notes – Relevant notes like frequent price fluctuations, inventory pressures, etc.
Here is an example of a completed card for our fictitious water treatment business. Notice that there isn’t a great deal of detail. Rather, it’s a high level overview of the particular product offering.
Once you complete cards for each of your products/services, organize them into stacks based on category. Do you see a pattern emerging? If not, perhaps your categories are too fine grained and you need to re-label them into larger groups. Within each category, order the cards based on priority. Ask yourself, “is the the order of importance of my product/service?” Clip everything together in their sorted order and put them aside for the next step.
You’ve accomplished the first step towards developing an information architecture for your web site! Subsequent articles will cover developing a navigation scheme and sketching the initial site layout. It would be a good idea to review your cards with a business partner or trusted associate. A second set of eyes often leads to insights!
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