“I want all my services, my service theory, company mission… to be on my website.” My advice to business starters who do not have much energy for their website is always: Put your essence on the website and cut down the noise. It is not wrong to put as much information as you want on the website, but often, business owners fail to effectively build a clear website structure, resulting in the audience getting lost on the website. A clear website structure is as important as your website content. Imagine you are visiting Disneyland Park; you will look at the map and choose the area to go to by characters, rides, restaurants. Everything in Disneyland Park is enticing, but only by giving you a nice navigation, you know where to go. Your website is the same, and it should be like a tour guide showing your audience the fastest way to get what they want.
How to structure a website?
Here’s a step-by-step guide to structuring a website, and I will use a B2B SaaS company as an example.
- Identify Your Content: The first step is to identify all the information you want to convey to your audience. For example, a B2B SaaS company probably talks about all the products or services, the company's background, contact information, testimonials, case studies, and other information.
- Group Similar Content: Once you have listed all your content, the next step is to group them based on their similarities. Here you might ask: aren’t there many ways to group the content? Which is the best way? My advice is to think about how your audience makes decisions on what content to look at. For example, if your B2B SaaS company serves different industries, you might group your services based on the industries. Or you can group the services by their functionalities, such as AI/ML, NLP, or others. Put yourselves in the audience’s shoes, think about how the categorization helps them find what they want.
- Conduct Card Sorting: If you're unsure about how to categorize your content, consider conducting card sorting exercises. This involves asking friends, family, or even potential users to organize your content into groups that make sense to them. This can provide valuable insights into how your audience perceives and navigates your content.
Good examples of website structure:
Dialogue: Catering to users at different knowledge levels.
Dialogue, a B2B Health Platform provider, helps audiences with different knowledge levels about their product to navigate the website by categorizing their solutions by solution names themselves and audience groups. Imagine an audience coming to the website without knowing the products; they just need to choose the group of people they belong to, and they get relevant information.
Allrecipes: Catering to different intentions.
Allrecipes is a recipe source. With different categories, it perfectly demonstrates how to meet audience needs. Whenever they come here looking for recipes for Christmas or beef leftovers, they know where to click and locate the recipes.
Amazon Web Services (AWS): Massive but in order.
AWS has over 100 products, but they categorize them well by technology. In addition to that, it also has a featured service section for people who have no idea about the jargon.
