When building a website, one of the first things to be considered is its structure. This is fundamental to the success of a site and, if planned properly, can avoid many issues further down the line. Website architecture design involves planning the layout and design of the website, identifying the pages to be included, determining how consumers will navigate the site, and planning how these pages will link together. Based on the learning from market research and competitor website performance, the marketing team—along with subject matter experts, such as website developers—is responsible for ensuring the optimal website architecture design.
One of the factors that the marketing team must consider when planning the website architecture is click-depth. Click-depth or crawl-depth refers to the minimum number of links a website visitor must click in order to get from the “root” web page to a particular desired web page. The root web page is the page that displays when only the domain is in the URL (no path information). Businesses must ensure that the click-depth is kept as low as possible, so that users and search engines can reach any point on the site within a minimum number of clicks.
The marketing team analyzes how each page will be linked internally and externally, creating categories and subcategories within the site. While creating the website, search-friendly URLs should be used to increase the relevance of the links and help the organic ranking for the website. As well, duplicate meta tags, meta descriptions, and titles should be avoided to prevent confusing web crawlers.
In short, the website design architecture should assure visitors they are on the right page; ensure visitors can easily find what they are looking for by providing a clear navigation path and search feature; properly link together and by ensuring the various pages; and ensure that the website is easy to navigate not only for customers, but also for web crawlers, so that they can be detected by search engines.
