Web Development and Database

Administration
Level-III

Module Title: Website Information Architecture

Module code: EIS WDDBA3 M03 1123
Nominal duration: 60 Hours
Compiled by: KISI BAKASHO
MARCH 2, 2024
Nekemte, Oromia
Unit One: Identification of content needs
This unit is developed to provide you the necessary information regarding the
following content coverage and topics:
 Strategic intent of website
 Development of information requirement
 Identification and Categorization of Information
 Content Requirements
Strategic Intent of Website

Strategic intent is the term used to describe the aspirational plans,

overarching purpose or intended direction of travel needed to reach an
organizational vision. Beneficial change results from the strategic intent,
ambitions and needs of an organization.

Strategic intent for website development refers to the overarching goals

and purpose that drive the creation and evolution of a website. It goes
beyond just the technical aspects of development and encompasses the
broader business or organizational objectives. Here are some key elements
that may be part of the strategic intent for website development:

Business Objectives:

- Identify and align the website's goals with the overall business
objectives.

- Determine how the website can contribute to revenue generation,

brand awareness, customer acquisition, or other key business metrics.

Example: Increase online sales by 20% within the next fiscal year. Or enhance brand visibility
and engagement by attracting 30% more unique visitors to the website.

 Target Audience:

- Clearly define the target audience for the website.

- Understand the needs, preferences, and behaviors of the target audience to tailor the website
accordingly.
Example: Identify the primary target audience as tech-savvy millennial interested in sustainable
living. Or understand the needs of B2B clients in the healthcare industry seeking efficient supply
chain solutions.

 Brand Image and Positioning:

- Ensure that the website reflects and enhances the organization's brand image.

- Consider how the website contributes to the overall brand positioning in the market.

Example: Ensure the website design and messaging aligns with the brand's values of innovation
and environmental consciousness. Or position the brand as an industry leader through thought
leadership content and a professional, modern website design.

 User Experience (UX):

- Prioritize an excellent user experience to keep visitors engaged and satisfied.

- Consider usability, accessibility, and responsiveness across various devices.

Example: Implement intuitive navigation and a clean layout for easy browsing. Or prioritize
mobile responsiveness to cater to users accessing the site from various devices.

 Content Strategy:

- Develop a content strategy that aligns with the overall marketing and communication goals.

- Plan for the creation and maintenance of content that resonates with the target audience.

Example: Develop a blog that consistently publishes articles on industry trends, demonstrating
expertise. Or create engaging multimedia content, such as videos and info graphics, to convey
complex information in a digestible manner.

 Technology and Functionality:

- Choose the right technology stack and functionalities based on the website's goals.

- Ensure scalability, security, and flexibility to adapt to future needs.

Example: Choose a content management system (CMS) that allows easy content updates by
non-technical staff. Or implement an e-commerce platform with secure payment gateways for
online transactions.

 Analytics and Measurement:

- Establish key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure the success of the website.
 - Implement analytics tools to track user behavior, conversions, and other relevant metrics.

Example: Set KPIs like conversion rates, average session duration, and bounce rates to measure
website performance. Or utilize tools like Google Analytics to track user behavior and gather
insights for continuous improvement.

 Integration with Other Systems:

- Consider how the website integrates with other systems within the organization.

- Ensure seamless data flow and consistency across different platforms.

Example: Integrate the website with the customer relationship management (CRM) system for
streamlined lead management. Or connect the e-commerce platform with inventory management
to ensure real-time stock updates.

 Adaptability and Future Growth:

- Plan for the website's adaptability to changes in technology and market trends.

- Anticipate future growth and scalability requirements.

Example: Choose a modular architecture that allows easy integration of new features and
technologies. Or plan for scalability by selecting a hosting solution that can accommodate
increased traffic and data storage needs.

Difference Between a Webpage and Website

When it comes to the internet and browsing, there are a lot of jargons and technical terms doing
the rounds, of which webpages and websites also make the list. In this article, we try to give a
definition of these terms and compare them. These are two related terms, but with different
functionalities. While it is easy to get them mixed up, we have tried to explain the difference
between webpage and website in this article.

A. Website

A website is a combination or collection of webpages grouped together, often handled by a

person or an organization, which can be accessed anywhere and anytime by anyone via the
internet. This is also a good method to market the businesses and help them grow well. All these
pages are linked together using the hyperlinks. Websites can also be either static or interactive.
In the meantime, some popular categories of websites are affiliate websites, e-commerce
websites, dating websites, social networking websites and more.
 B. Webpage

Webpage, in the meanwhile, is a single document or page that is displayed in web browsers like
the Firefox, Google Chrome, Opera and so on. This is used to make up the World Wide Web
(WWW) and is used chiefly to sell products and services to users or visitors. A unique URL
address is also attached to the webpages and is used to render or access that particular page.
Webpages can also be either static or dynamic.

 Distinguishing Between a Website and a Webpage

Table 1.1. Distinguishing Between a Website and a Webpage

Webpage Website

A webpage contains content about a specific A website houses content on a variety of topics
topic

Created using HTML and CSS Content is coded in HTML

Can be accessed via a direct URL link or Accessed through a domain address
through a website

A single hypertext document linked to a A collection of various pages hosted on a

website server

Stores the content or resources to be displayed Stores the content or resources to be displayed
on a website on a website

Generally, simpler to develop Can be more complex to develop

Takes less time to develop Development may take more time

Website strategy
Developing a comprehensive website strategy begins with a clear definition of the website's
purpose and goals. Whether it's an informational platform, an e-commerce site, or a lead
generation tool, setting specific and measurable objectives is crucial. Understanding your
audience is equally vital, necessitating the creation of detailed user personas that outline
demographics, behaviors, and preferences. Additionally, conducting competitive analyses helps
identify unique value propositions and potential areas for improvement.
Maintaining brand consistency is key to building trust and recognition. This involves ensuring
that the website's design, messaging, and tone align with the overall brand identity. A strong
focus on user experience (UX) design is essential, encompassing intuitive navigation, a clean
layout, and mobile responsiveness. Usability testing is often employed to identify and address
any issues that may impact the user experience.
A robust content strategy is pivotal for success, aligning with business goals and resonating with
the target audience. This includes a mix of content formats, such as blog posts, videos, info
graphics, and downloadable resources. Quality and relevance are paramount to establishing the
website as a valuable resource. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is another critical element,
involving keyword research, on-page optimization, and the development of a backlink strategy.
In the realm of technology and development, choosing a suitable content management system
(CMS) and prioritizing security measures are paramount. Performance optimizations contribute
to faster loading times, enhancing the overall user experience. Analytics and measurement tools,
like Google Analytics, are instrumental in tracking user behavior and key performance indicators
(KPIs), providing valuable insights for ongoing improvement.
Social media integration should align with your content strategy, fostering engagement and
sharing. For e-commerce websites, a seamless and secure online shopping experience is crucial,
involving features like product recommendations and a user-friendly checkout process.
Legal and compliance considerations, including data protection and privacy laws, should be
addressed through clear communication of terms of use and privacy policies.
Regular testing, including A/B testing, facilitates continuous improvement, guided by user
feedback. Marketing and promotion efforts, spanning email marketing, social media, and online
advertising, contribute to driving traffic and engagement. Designing the website architecture
with scalability in mind ensures adaptability to future growth and technological advancements.
Regular updates to the website strategy are necessary to stay responsive to changing business
goals and market conditions.
Developing an effective website strategy involves a series of steps to ensure alignment with your
business goals, target audience needs, and the ever-evolving digital landscape.
By following these steps, you'll create a holistic website strategy that considers not only the
technical aspects but also the user experience, content, branding, and ongoing optimization
required for a successful online presence.
 1.1 Development of information requirement
Website requirements are a list of necessary functions, capabilities, or characteristics related to
your website and the plans for creating it. There are several types of requirements that may be
defined during the process that come together to focus and prioritize the project plan.
At a higher level, most can fall within one of the following categories:
 Business Requirements define the objectives and what problems the stakeholder
intends to solve with the product.
 User Requirements describe how user expectations and how they will interact with
the product. Use the features, functions, and content described in your scenarios to
develop your requirements. Your user scenarios should outline the tasks your users
want to complete on your site.
 Functional Requirements provide details of how a product should behave and
specify what is needed for development.
 Quality-of-Service Requirements detail what characteristics a product must
maintain in order to maintain its effectiveness and any constraints.
 Implementation Requirements are used to detail changes in process, team roles,
migration from one system to another, etc.
Website requirements only tell you what your website must have and what it must allow users to
do. Requirements do not tell you how to design or develop the site to have those features,
functions, and content. The other design steps help you figure out how to make sure that the site
is organized, written, and designed to satisfy the requirements.
 Requirements Best Practices
Requirements can begin as a phrase or one-sentence description of what the site must have or
must allow users to do but will become more detailed as you move through the process.
Requirements gathering can be complex but they help ensure project success. The following
characterize strong requirements documents. They should be:
 Specific and not conjugate two distinct requirements
 Complete and well thought out
 Consistent with and prioritized based on the objectives outlined in governance
documents and charters
 Able to be verified during testing
What do you need to build a website is the following:
1. Domain name
2. Web Hosting
3. Business email address
4. Logo design
5. Favicon (Favorites Icon)
6. Images
7. Text content
8. Web Designer
9. SSL (Security Socket Layer)
10. Google Analytics
11. XML Sitemap
12. Website security and firewall
13. Website maintenance
Intended Audience
An intended audience helps you focus your marketing efforts and reduce the chances that your
marketing campaign will fail. The audience is an essential part of every marketing campaign.
Whether launching a new product or service, you’ll need to decide who your target audience is.

After all, it will be hard to market if you don’t know who your offer is best suited for. But who is
the target audience? And how do you find a target audience?

 Your Audience

The ―intended audience‖ is the group of people for which the service or product is made. You
could also think of this group as the ―targeted audience‖ in another sense. A target audience is a
group of people to whom you want to sell a product or service. It may show the kind of people
who are more likely to buy that product or service

A target audience could be working moms in San Francisco between the ages of 25 and 34 who
are interested in healthy food and make between $4,000 and $5,000 a month. These customers
can be described by their age, income, interests, and past purchases. Some of these things are a
person’s location, age, job, level of education, and annual income. Companies also use target
audiences to describe their buyer personas or ideal customers. But a perfect customer profile is
even more specific than a target audience.
  The importance of identifying your intended audience

Know your audience is a common phrase. These sage words can serve as the foundation for
successful marketing campaigns. It’s impossible to reach everyone at once. So defining your
target audience is extremely important. Businesses of all sizes can compete in today’s market if
they target a small but targeted audience. You can save time and money by focusing on the needs
of your current customers when developing your marketing strategy.

Targeting a specific group of people may appear exclusive, but this does not mean that you are
excluding those who do not meet your criteria. To get the most out of your marketing dollars, it
is essential to know your target audience. Using this method, you’ll be able to generate business
leads cost-effectively and efficiently.

 Tips to determine intended audience

Fig 2.1: Types of audience

Types of client interactions

After all that research, you’ll have a lot of information at your disposal. But you’ll also need to
analyze that data to get a clear picture of your intended audience, their likes and dislikes, their
habits, and their demographic and psychographic data.

Using your collected information, you can look for patterns to further divide your audience and
make more targeted marketing campaigns. You can also make personas and determine value
propositions based on how you interpret the data.
Each type of customer interaction is unique and demands slightly different responses. Let’s go
over them:

 Requests: These interactions involve customers asking for new features and functionalities.
Let such customers know that you’ve received their requests and will get back to them.

 Questions: Customers that don’t understand how to get something done or are trying to
figure out your tool will reach out with questions. Providing an in-app resource center with
rich materials will enable these customers to solve most of their problems themselves.

 Complaints: All customer interactions are important, but complaints should be taken very
seriously. Not every user that encounters friction will come complaining. Best believe the
few who do represent a large chunk that will rather lag or churn than send complaints

 Compliments: These interactions come from satisfied customers who reach out to praise
your brand. Appreciate them for taking the time to compliment you. You could also
encourage them to leave a review if they can.

Long- And Short-Term Goals for The Site

Website Development Company analyzes the client requirements. They create goals and timeline
to start with the work.

 Realistic goals - Being realistic means, you’re aware of your goals. Such goals avoid any
frustration, when you repeatedly fail to achieve goals. For example, few people always set
high – goals and give up soon. As a result, they fail to achieve it. While setting long-term
or short-term goals, make sure they are achievable.

 Short-term goals - It’s simple to create such goals because; designers achieve within hours
or minutes. In Web designing, it can take up to few days or months. Because of this short-
period, it’s easy to understand the factors that might hinder your goals. Therefore, be
certain to achieve goals within the given timeline. Also, web design companies will break
down longer goals into small chunks. They attach a date to achieve each chunk and move
on to next.

 Long-term goals - Making long-term goals is quite difficult especially in Dubai or

Abu Dhabi. Because, these middle-east emirates grow digitally every second. So,
have an option to change your long-term goals with the trend. While, setting long-
term goals consider few factors. Prefer goals that are not too rigid, with the options
of changing as time progress. Be flexible, because people always rewrite and adjust
 long-term goals. In a web design firm, end results are specific. For instance, you aim
to open a branch of your business within five years. This goal will motivate towards
expanding your business. Keep long-term goals at the forefront and see if you have
achieved them

1.2 Identification and Categorization of Information

How do you identify needs in a business? Identifying your business needs consists of
noting each business problem, goal, or scenario, and the related progression of actions
required to resolve it. For example, if your business need is to process customer orders,
you might note the following actions: Receive order.

Information assets include documents, emails, web content, business data, images, video
and other content in both physical and digital form. An information asset has a dominant
and logical concept or grouping. It is not determined by a physical manifestation.
Although it is logical, it also has tangible business meaning. To recognize the logical
nature of an information asset, focus on its purpose, ignoring the underlying applications
and technologies

1.3 Content requirements

A. Content Requirements
Much of the time, when we talk about content, we’re referring to text. But images, audio,
and video can be more important than the accompanying text. These different content types
can also work together to fulfill a single requirement. For example, a content feature
covering a sporting event might have an article accompanied by photographs and video
clips. Identifying all the content types associated with a feature can help you determine what
resources will be needed to produce the content (or whether it can be produced at all).

The expected size of each of your content features has a huge influence on the user
experience decisions you will have to make. Your content requirements should provide
rough estimates of the size of each feature: word count for text features, pixel dimensions
for images or video, and file sizes for downloadable, stand-alone content elements like audio
files or PDF documents. These size estimates don’t have to be precise—approximations are
fine. We only have to collect the essential information needed to design an appropriate
vehicle for that content.

Designing a site to provide access to small thumbnail images is different from designing a
site to provide access to full-screen photographs; knowing in advance the size of the content
 elements we have to accommodate enables us to make smart, informed decisions along the
way.

It’s important to identify who will be responsible for each content element as early as
possible. Once it has been validated against our strategic objectives, any content feature
inevitably sounds like a really good idea—as long as someone else is responsible for
creating and maintaining it.

If we get too deep into the development process without identifying who will be
responsible for every required content feature, we’re likely to end up with gaping holes in
our site because those features everybody loved when they were hypothetical turned out to
be too much work for anyone to actually take on.

And that’s what people often forget when developing requirements: Content is hard work.
You might be able to hire on contract resources (or, more likely, stick someone down in
marketing with the job) to create the content in time for the initial launch, but who will
keep it up to date? Content—well, effective content, anyway— requires constant
maintenance. Approaching content as if you can post it and forget it leads to a site that,
over time, does an increasingly poor job of meeting user needs.

B. Content types:

1. By purpose: Selling, entertainment and educational (informational);

2. By format: Text, graphic, video and audio materials.

C. Text Content

Includes product descriptions, various articles, reviews, announcements, and

other similar formats. The main types of text content:

 Copyright

A text written by a journalist or copywriter from scratch. Represents unique content that
is preferred by both search engines and users. Authorship material increases loyalty to the
product, service and the company itself, its recognition, which is reflected in conversion
and sales.

 Rewrite

A modified version of the finished text. Replacing words from the original article with
synonyms and rearranging sentences that does not have a positive effect on the style,
perception and position of the site in the search results. However, rewriting with a changed
structure and information from several sources in quality is similar to copyright.

 Adapted Material

Language translation of the article. It is considered unique content from the point of view
of search engines, since the translation creates author's material.

 Copy-Paste

Copying an article from other sources without making changes of the text. Despite the
ease and speed of filling up the site with such content, copy-pasting is not recommended
for use.

Consequences of such method:

 Getting the resource under the sanctions of search engines;

 Violation of copyrighting law;

 Negative impact on the company's reputation.

 Visual and Auditory Content

The advantages of this format in comparison with text content are greater attractiveness,
memorability and accessibility.

 Images

The graphic accompaniment of the text facilitates its perception and increases the
possibility of its complete reading. Graphic support means pictures, photographs,
illustrations, diagrams, animation, screenshots and slides. The most effective info graphics
are those that increase traffic by 12% on average. Combine statistics and interesting facts
not to overload the article with numbers and improve its perception of the target audience.

Data visualization works better than textual explanations of complex concepts and
processes, justification of the value and principles of product use, etc.
 Video and Audio Content

Filling the site with audio and video content allows you to extend the time that users
spend on the resources, which is taken into account when ranking. One Third of all the
activities on Internet accounts are video content watching. Embedding videos in landing
pages increases conversions by 80%, according to Hub spot. This makes video one of the
best content marketing tools to reach and attract target audience. Short and compelling
informational videos help to engage consumers at the awareness stage. Video tutorials and
demos work through the buying decision stages. Audio content is varied: music,
recordings of interviews, lectures and webinars, podcasts. Use audio content as training
material or testimonials to build trust in the company and increase awareness of a product
or service.

 Selling Content

Selling copy identifies a problem and proposes a solution for your product or service.
Such content accounts for 10-15% of all placements. When compiling selling texts, we
recommend that you refuse to use specific terms and long explanations. Deliver
information to the point: concise and accessible. Highlight possible doubts, objections and
questions from potential customers to build them into the text and close problems. For
example, if the price is high, offer options for a phased payment, purchase on credit or
installments, a discount to regular customers or those who brought a friend. Rely on
proven facts.