Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, Second Edition

Architecture Style Guides

A web site is always growing and changing. As an information architect, you must guide its development or risk architectural drift. It’s frustrating to see your carefully designed organization, navigation, labeling, and indexing systems get mangled as site maintainers add content without heeding the architectural implications. While it may be impossible to completely prevent this disfigurement, an architecture style guide can steer content maintainers in the right direction.

An architecture style guide is a document that explains how the site is organized, why it is organized that way, and how the architecture should be extended as the site grows. The guide should begin with documentation of the mission and vision for the site, as it’s important to understand the original goals. Continue with information about the intended audiences. Who was the site designed for? What assumptions were made about their information needs? Then, follow up with a description of the content development policy. What types of content will and won’t be included and why? How often will it be updated? When will it be removed? And who will be responsible for it?

Documenting the lessons learned and the decisions made during the research, strategy, and design phases is very important. These underlying philosophies drove the design of the architecture. Future major modifications to the architecture should be influenced by this early work. Also, if the goals change or the assumptions ...