Website Architecture

Website Architecture is the backbone you will design and build your web site on. Once you have it, you have a clear picture of where you’re going. But are there patterns we can rely on when designing this architecture. Well, yes:

First things first, you have to know what are the goals of your web site, and what you want to put in it . Very often, this will be enough to know what architecture to chose.

Website Architecture types:

The One Page website:

Yes, very often, you don’t think to this one, but think twice. Sometimes it’s enough. Remember that very often, each time your visitors have to click, you lose some of them… are you sure you cannot put all that information in one page?

The Hierarchy:

Probably the most common one, specially for corporate web sites. You have one home page that distributes the other pages, but still a menu let’s you go from a page to another page of the same level.

The Funnel

You take your visitors from a page to another one, through ordered steps. It can be selling steps, or subscribing steps, or replying to a survey steps, or filling your profile steps, etc. 
The funnel is very efficient to make your visitors perform an action.

The Circle

The circle is used to make your visitors do the same thing again and again, going through the same steps. For example:  play, display score, play again, display scores again, etc.
Or it can be used by a gambling web site, so that they make you gamble a little amount (easier to market), and then a little amount again, etc.

The Central Page

You have one main page, or home page, and each time you need to go back to this page to take a new direction. It’s often used for online tools, like a mail client where you have to go back to the inbox several times while you perform your day to day tasks.

The Matrix

Probably the most complicated to design, but also very powerful. You can basically go to any page from any page. It’s the website architecture also introduced by tags. for example : each tag "Beijing" or "China" is a link to a page with many objects (blog posts for example) which speaks about "beijing" or "china", and each blog post has, again, new tags to take you to another tag page, etc.

It’s also used in ecommerce. Example: You need to put your coke next to beverages, but you also need to display it next to chips (cause when you eat chips you drink coke), and maybe next to whiskey (cause many people mix whiskey and coke).
The matrix architecture design is very powerful with big size websites.

Mixture

Often, website architecture design is a mixture of all these design patterns. You don’t have to choose just one. For example: you use a funnel to make your visitors buy an access to your game, and then you put them in a circle so that they keep playing the longest time.
Or you use a matrix to make your clients buy and fill their cart, and then you use a funnel to take them to checkout.

So, do you know other website architecture design patterns? Feel free to bookmark this post to come back when needed.