Friday 23rd April 2010 by Peter Furtado

When you plan your information architecture, you are aiming to present your wares in a manner that will make immediate sense to your customers, while reflecting the particular values of your brand, but your IA serves another function as well. It offers the scaffolding for your thoughts - a bit like contents page of a book, or the timetable of a conference. It has to be logically organised.

It’s true of course that the web allows myriad pathways to find information, and search engines may take visitors straight to any page deep in your site, your IA still provides a sequential framework for planning what to put in it, where to put it, and how to present it.

You’ll want to offer relevant and unique material on every page, but the way you do so depends, in part, on what went before and what comes after. If you don’t, you’ll finish up offering a spider-web of links across the site that will finish up confusing and irritating the visitor.

Yet this creates a real paradox for knowing how to get the thing written.

 

Options for authorship

You could decide to write it all yourself, holding the entire structure in your head as go. But if your organisation and your site is anything other than small, you probably won’t be able to do that, even if you wanted to. The maths bears this out. Suppose your site has 200 pages, and suppose that each page needs an average of 300 words, and you want to present new (or at least revised) copy to go with your new web brand. That means you have 60,000 words to write: the equivalent to a novel. Every sentence will ideally need polishing up, then checking and rechecking with your experts, the people who know more than you about the topic you’re writing about.  

In many cases those experts will be your colleagues, and they’ll have their own views on what to say and how to say it. What they are less likely to have is a full understanding of your IA and the place of ‘their‘ pages within it. At best, you have to book a conversation about each section, if not page; at worst, you can anticipate an argument. It is not unusual for someone who’s taken on the job of preparing the website copy in this manner to allow three times as much time for getting the copy approved as it takes to write it.

An alternative option is to get all those experts in the business to write their pages for you. That way, you can be sure of the accuracy of the copy; but what chance is there that it will be in the style you want, consistent with everything else, and coherent from the point of view of your IA? If it’s not, you’re going to want to edit or rewrite it, and you may well find yourself back into those meetings or arguments.

So how can you get a coherent, reasonably written website without going barmy or taking forever over it? The answer lies in three factors: brand vision, briefing and permissions. All are related, each one being an aspect of your internal communications strategy.

 

You are who you say you are

First you must communicate to your key team members, with absolute clarity, what you are in business to do, what you represent, what you are.  It may sound crazy to suggest your key and senior colleagues might have been working with you for years without actually knowing what the business is about; but the truth is that, all too frequently, an organisation changes direction, through force of circumstance, without anyone really noticing, and that different team members have different understanding of what you are trying to achieve. It’s also quite common to find that the process of planning your new website involves a shift in your strategic narrative, and that not everyone is fully up to speed. Any such differences will become magnified online, so you have to be clear, with yourself and with all team members, as to what you are trying to achieve, what your USP is, who you really are.

Simply communicating this vision for the organisation will instil an interest in, and understanding of, the vision for the new website and how the IA expresses it. Getting key colleagues to understand this is vital to getting them to produce the copy you need without too much agony.

This is the first part of the briefing process; the second part is a clear statement of the specific purpose of the page within the visitor journey, the expectations which will bring the reader to the page, and the next destination or tasks that will result. Third is the expected style or tone, and length. Fourth, your requirements for tags, heading style and other strategies for ensuring the page will be found by internal and external search engines; and for internal and external linking. Finally, your expectations from the team member – final copy, or accurate data from which you can yourself write the live copy – and the date by which you need it complete.

 

Setting the groundrules

Whether or not you opt to write a page yourself, or accept the copy from your colleague, depends on their – and your – confidence in how well they can write to your brief. But there’s no point in deluding  yourself here. You can, of course, send them on a “writing for the web” training course, but you should also recognise that it’s not always easy for people to learn a new writing style, and it may not be worth the effort of getting them to do it. You may have a colleague who can write clear, accurate and logical reports, yet if you want something conversational or energetic and if their natural tone is bureaucratic or pedantic, then you may decide you’re better off persuading them that they aren’t the right person to write their pages for you. Better to have this person as an expert looking over your shoulder and helping you get it right, than leaving a bitter legacy of crushed egos, or having a page that confuses or disappoints your visitors.

Here, we have moved into the third of my interlocking factors, permissions. Set up your CMS with a range of roles – author, editor, expert, publisher – each of whom can perform different functions: create a new page; draft a new page or its elements; edit or approve the page; publish and unpublish the page. It would be time well spent to sit down with each of your colleagues, and  decide on the roles that will get the job best, for you and for them.

‘What works’ would be my rule of thumb here – you don’t want to set up an approvals and publishing procedure so bureaucratic that it creates new bottlenecks. You want people to work with you rather than for you (or even against you), to see their contribution to the site as a positive aspect of their job, one that they are proud of and not an onerous extra.  In some circumstances you may decide to force someone to venture outside their comfort zone, but if you decide to do this it should be for some wider organizational benefit than getting your website written.

Finally, once the thing is complete and up online, you’ll need a procedure for updating it all. Updates, of course, will sometimes we requested by you, sometimes by your colleagues, and sometimes (as in the case of news) they will be continuous. To make this run smoothly, you may need different permissions, as a system appropriate for creating the site may not be appropriate for maintaining it. There will be some pages you’ll still need absolute control over, but for others – news pages perhaps, or others that will change frequently –you’ll want to leave the decision to publish to the creative department.