The art and science of website structures
Posted by dpascoe on May 29, 2008
The first time I laid eyes on the Maxamine software was in 1998 - the company was a year old at the time. Although a lot has happened and the software has gotten increasingly more sophisticated and powerful over time, the basics were already there, and I was immediately hooked.
The comprehensive data collection made possible by the incredibly thorough spider, combined with the storage of the data in a spatial data architecture was so powerful and elegant, and the maps were fascinating to look at and manipulate. Just think of it - if you could round up every detail there is to know about a thing - in this case a website - the only thing left to do is figure out what question you want to ask. When a regular person, with no technical expertise, can ask that question and get an answer back in a matter of seconds, it puts the power in the hands of the site owners and operators, to react at a moment’s notice to whatever is thrown at them and their websites - by visitors, regulators, competitors, even their own organizations.
This image is a shot of the way I see websites - not as pretty pages in a browser window; rather as an interlinked combination of words, images, scripts, stylesheets, pages in a three-dimensional space. The maps are always fascinating and beautiful, and the best part of all is that this seemingly complex picture holds the key to fast, flexible analysis: it preserves the relationships of all the objects to each other, and makes it possible for me to know every intimate detail about this site.
So what do you want to know? Are your web analytics implemented correctly and are the tags functioning? How easy have you made it for Google to index your site? Does your site speak the same language as the people searching for you? Are the pages you’ve linked to outside your site the same as they were when you linked to them? Are they still there? Does your site comply with privacy legislation? With Accessibility legislation? Are you drawing people in or driving them away? Exactly where in the site are all the references to the product you just discontinued, the prices you just changed, the subsidiary you just rebranded, the logo you just relaunched?
Over the years, we have examined thousands of sites. Themes emerge; relationships are identified; complexity visualized; problems are uncovered; all is revealed.
When you can understand your structure and the problems lurking inside it, then you have a framework for understanding how visitors find you, what kind of experience they are having, if it’s bad, what’s causing it, what is keeping them from taking the action you want them to take. You have a framework to determine whether the site is structured correctly and structurally sound enough to deliver on the business objectives you have set for it. You have a way to know what needs to be optimized over time and how those efforts impact the larger picture. And a way to put web analytics data and search optimization, marketing and branding efforts into perspective.
Every site is a new picture, and every picture tells a story, don’t it 
