Teardowns
Your homepage doesn't say what you do, and you can't tell because you're inside it.
Why your homepage probably doesn't explain what your company does, and why you're the last person who would notice.
Read More↗Information architecture
Information architecture (IA) is how a website's content is organized and named: what the sections are, what they're called, and what path a visitor follows to find what they came for.
In practice
IA fails quietly. A manufacturer organizes the site by internal department names, and a buyer looking for "CNC machining tolerances" can't tell which of "Solutions," "Capabilities," or "Services" to click. Every extra guess costs a share of visitors, and the homepage often doesn't say what the company does in the first place.
The deepest IA problems are vocabulary problems. A company labels a section with the word used in its own hallways ("Solutions"), and the buyer searching for a specific process ("passivation," "wire EDM") never recognizes it as the place to look. Decades of research on how people navigate sites point the same way: match the words to the user's task, not the org chart [1].
Good IA for a B2B site starts from buyer questions, not org charts: what do you make, for whom, to what specs, and how do I get a quote. The navigation should answer those in one glance.
Navigation is IA made visible, and it's where the cost shows up. Every ambiguous label ("Capabilities" versus "Services" versus "Solutions") forces a guess, and every guess sheds a share of visitors. Clear, buyer-worded top-level sections do more for findability than any amount of on-page search.
You can test your own IA without any tools. Write down the five things a buyer most needs to find (a capability, a spec, a certification, proof, a quote path), hand your site to someone outside the company, and ask them to find each one while you stay silent. Every pause and wrong click is a paying visitor you don't normally get to watch leave.
Common questions
What are the signs of bad information architecture?
High drop-off on entry pages, buyers emailing to ask for things already on the site, a navigation with overlapping labels, and internal debates about which menu a page belongs in. If your own team isn't sure where something lives, neither is a buyer.
What's the difference between information architecture and navigation?
IA is the underlying structure: what content exists, how it's grouped, and what it's called. Navigation is the visible menu that exposes that structure. Good navigation can't rescue a bad IA; if the grouping is wrong, a prettier menu just labels the confusion.
How many items should a website's main navigation have?
Fewer than most sites have. A handful of clear, buyer-worded sections beats a long menu that mirrors your departments. If a menu needs sub-sub-menus to fit everything, that usually means the underlying structure needs simplifying, not that the menu needs more room.
Can we fix information architecture without a full redesign?
Sometimes, if the content is sound and only the grouping and labels are off; renaming sections and reorganizing the menu is cheaper than a rebuild. But if the structure describes a business you've outgrown, the IA fix and the [redesign](/glossary/website-redesign-vs-refresh/) are the same project.
Source
- Nielsen Norman Group, information architecture research. nngroup.com/topic/information-architecture
