Professional SharePoint® 2010 Branding and User Interface Design

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CHAPTER 3 PLANNING FOR BRANDING

Information Architecture

Along with the physical appearance of a SharePoint site, another important aspect is the amount of

information it will contain and how that information will be organized. Information architecture is

the term used to describe a blueprint for outlining how information should be stored and organized.

This process is particularly important in content management systems like SharePoint, which often

contain websites with hundreds or thousands of pages and documents. For the users approaching

this mountain of information, the act of fi nding what they want can be similar to fi nding the pro-

verbial needle in a haystack. Imagine going to your local grocery store for your favorite cereal and

fi nding that the products were shelved randomly, in no logical fashion, just placed on the shelves in

whatever order they arrived. It might take you an hour just to fi nd your box of cereal. Luckily, gro-

cery stores organize their products so that you can easily navigate them. Website information can

be treated much the same way. If it is placed randomly, users will have a diffi cult time fi nding what

they want. The key to designing a website that makes it easy for users to fi nd the information they

need is to create an effective taxonomy.

Taxonomy is the science of classifying and organizing things, and it is a core component of infor-

mation a ...