Information architecture for your website
Shayna here. Happy November! Previously, we wrote on the theme of accessibility and mentioned POPCO’s Enabled Prep launch. This month, let’s continue the theme of accessibility as we look at the structural work underlying every website, in every language.
What’s that, you ask? We’re talking about information architecture.
What is information architecture and why does it matter, even if I’m not a web designer?
Information architecture through a librarian’s lens
Imagine that your website is a library. Because, well… it is! If you treat your site like a library or museum, you help visitors orient (“you are here”) and reach the most valuable content without being overwhelmed.
Why architecture comes before design
- Your website is two things at once: a public experience for visitors and an internal workspace for you (and your team)
- Visual design solves the first half — content architecture solves the second
- The architecture determines whether the site is easy to grow, easy to maintain, and easy to keep consistent over the next five years
- A well-structured site is like a library: every piece of content has a clear shelf, and the shelving system shapes everything downstream
Your working library (e.g. website) holds many things: articles, maps, resources, events, staff bios, announcements, etc. And like any library, it needs a shelving system. The shelving system you choose shapes how visitors find what they’re looking for, how your team adds new content without creating a mess, and even how long it takes to fix a broken link two years from now.
The technical name for that shelving system is information architecture. It’s the layer that sits between the visual design (what the site looks like) and the content (what the site says). Most people don’t address information architecture until something goes wrong, but this layer determines whether the site can grow without becoming a maintenance burden.
Ryan frames it this way: think of a well-organized library, an airport, or a subway map. There is a whole field of design (sometimes called universal design) dedicated to making wayfinding implicit, without words, across cultures and languages. The best airport and transit signage is clear and easy to follow even for someone who has just arrived in a country where they don’t speak the language(s). It utilizes color codes, symbols, and spatial logic. It works for neurodivergent travelers, for tourists, and for anyone whose primary language isn’t that country’s language.
This is information architecture doing its job, and websites work exactly the same way.
The structure welcomes people, so that you can get to the terminal, the baggage claim, the taxi, or wherever you need to go.
Helpful words
Information architecture (IA): the practice of organizing, naming, and connecting content so people can find what they need.
Wayfinding: the design of navigation systems, physical or digital, that help people orient and move through a space.
Universal design: an approach to design that makes environments, systems, and communication usable by the widest range of people, without requiring adaptation or special accommodation.
Semiotics: the study of signs, symbols, and how meaning is communicated visually, across languages and cultures. The reason airport pictograms work whether you speak English, Spanish, or Mandarin.
Taxonomy: a shared vocabulary for categorizing and relating content, so the system does the connecting work instead of a person doing it manually.
Visitor journey: the most common path a visitor takes through a website. For example, arriving to look up maps and resources, or to answer questions about a specific location.
A little backstory
Fun fact! For years, Ryan served as director of the Durland Alternatives Library at Cornell, a non-profit dedicated to sustainability, organizing, and social change.
As the director, Ryan moved the library from one location to another, larger location. This meant designing a floor plan, reimagining the sections and categories, and orchestrating the move of more than 10,000 books. This kind of thing only works when you have a process for designing and then implementing a big transition.
Currently, while Ryan is no longer the library director, Alternatives Library continues to be a Maple care plan client.
Example: Redesigning fractracker.org, a high-impact environmental justice organization with more than 900 pages of content
Back in August, Ryan walked into a meeting with FracTracker: a national nonprofit that tracks oil and gas industry activity through data, investigative reporting, and (hundreds of) maps.
He discovered a “library” dilemma.
They hired Maple for a complete redesign, starting with a concept for how all the resources, maps, image galleries, press kits, events, etc… could be better structured.
Their website wasn’t just public-facing. It was also playing an important role in how each of their team members produced updates for the projects they were working on, and it needed to work for the team as much as for the public.
The unexpected costs of design drift
Since FracTracker first built their website it has grown to over 800 pages, roughly 1,000 embedded maps, and a media library of nearly 2,000 files. But the content wasn’t unified around clear categorization, and it wasn’t grounded in the specific ways people were trying to use the website.
Almost every one of those pages had been built as a one-off. There was no underlying structure or shared templates, so it had what we call “design drift”. This means design elements in one part of the website look different and behave differently than the same element in another part of the website. Making updates, then, is very tedious and labor-intensive.
This isn’t a particularly urgent problem, but it becomes more and more urgent as website content grows. And it becomes very expensive when you’re trying to do an accessibility update or make other design changes.
Creating a design system and clear information architecture allows you to make up-stream decisions that affect everything downstream.
This is really common with nonprofit organizations we work with. They have different team members working on the site, and some people come and go. The website grows and grows in content, but nobody’s holding it all together over time. This is one of the main reasons organizations enroll in a care plan: They get the benefits of having a developer and technical lead on their team without the risk of that role changing hands constantly. A care plan is also a more affordable option for getting consistent maintenance for your website and training.
The visitor experience of friction and broken links
The other thing that information architecture does is give content a consistent home. Before we got started, there was no shared vocabulary that connected different pieces of content on the website.
For example, Pennsylvania wasn’t a concept the site understood; it was just a word that happened to appear in some page titles. You couldn’t pull together everything FracTracker had published about Pennsylvania, because the site had no way of knowing that a map, a press release, or a piece of legislation were all about the same place.
The most common visitor journey is coming to the website and looking up maps and resources, or trying to answer questions about a specific location. That process needs to be intuitive and easy.
Start with these two fundamental questions
At the gathering, Ryan sat down with the FracTracker team:
What kinds of content does this site actually hold?
The answer, after a thorough audit: seven types.
- Pages (structural, evergreen content)
- Posts (news and announcements)
- Maps and Data
- Resources (reports, fact sheets, external research)
- Events
- Image Galleries
- Legislation
Every one of the 800+ pages belongs to one of those seven. Each type now has a defined purpose, a consistent set of fields, and a shared template.
Now publishing a new piece of content means filling in a form instead of building a layout from scratch.
How does the content connect?
This is where taxonomies come in. A taxonomy is a shared vocabulary that cuts across content types. Things like Topics (Data Centers, Water, Air Quality, Fracking) and States (Pennsylvania, Ohio, West Virginia).
Tag a map, a press release, and an event all with “Pennsylvania,” and the site can automatically assemble a Pennsylvania page pulling all three together. This way, there is no hand-maintained list, and no one updating links every time something new gets published. Instead, the tags do the work.
There’s a maintenance payoff too. When layouts are standardized across post types, fixing a problem in the template automatically fixes it across all posts using that layout. And when content needs to be recategorized or updated in bulk, it can be done through a spreadsheet import, rather than page-by-page.
This is where Ryan’s librarianship shines. In terms of information architecture for a website, he can talk about information through the lens of being a librarian and creating physical space. For instance, in a library you can be presented with 50,000 items and not be intimidated or overwhelmed.
With the right lens, you too can begin organizing your content into appropriate collections, categories, and architecture.
Where things stand now
Maple is deep in the build. The content architecture is confirmed, the database decision table covers all 1200+ URLs, and the team is working through Phase 1, covering the top 100 pages that account for 81 percent of the site’s traffic. The goal is a launch-ready site before their annual Sentinel Awards on November 12.
Phase 2, converting the remaining 700–800 pages, follows after that.
This project clearly demonstrates the concept of “architecture before design.” The FracTracker rebuild shows just how much invisible work goes into a well-functioning website.
What this can look like for you
For care plan clients, one of the most common things we see on older sites is content “drift.” Examples are pages that no longer serve a clear purpose, duplicated information in different places, or menus that grew by accretion rather than by design.
“Drift” is when organizational decisions don’t propagate to all the downstream pages they should. This creates redundancy, heavy maintenance, and site growth without coherence or a plan for how new content fits into what’s already there.
Part of what a care plan covers is keeping your site maintainable. When you build with Maple, it starts with understanding what kind of content you have and where it belongs. If you’ve ever felt like your site has gotten harder to navigate, it could be the sign of a structure problem and not a content problem.
What good structure looks like
A few things that signal a well-architected site:
- Visitors can tell where they are and what to do next without reading every word on the page
- Authors know where to put new content without asking
- Related content surfaces without manual curation
- URLs are readable and predictable (e.g., /resources/water/ rather than /?p=4872)
- The site can grow without the menu becoming a dropdown labyrinth
None of this is visible to visitors when it’s working. That’s the point; “good design is invisible.”
Standards can feel like a limit. I think they’re actually a gift: a way of being more accessible, more generous, and more inclusive. Accommodating people who have needs doesn’t just help those people. It makes things better for everybody.
Ryan Clover, Maple Creative
Service updates
No updates here! Site reports have been going out to Pro and Enterprise care plan clients, and our services for essential support continue for all clients. This includes the software, hosting, backups, and security to keep your website running smoothly.
Maintenance report: here’s what we caught in October
PHP vulnerability update. Last month, a critical PHP security vulnerability made headlines across the WordPress community.
If you received alarming emails about it, those were likely cold outreach using the news as a sales hook.
All Care Plan client sites were patched at the server level by Pressable right away, with no downtime and no action required on your end. PHP updates and proactive security monitoring are included in your care plan. Read our full breakdown here.
On the maintenance front more broadly, Mark has been working through a site health dashboard across all care plan sites to resolve PHP fatal errors, vulnerable plugins, and page speed issues.
Thanks, Mark, for keeping our sites healthy and actively monitored for performance!
Information architecture and accessibility for Maple clients
Ryan makes the connection to accessibility explicit.
Accessibility is not just abilities. It’s also language. It’s also inclusivity. It’s tone and style. We could really lean into all of these different areas of design through that lens of access and accessibility.
Ryan Clover, Maple Creative
For Maple’s clients—especially nonprofits working on social and environmental justice—accessibility is often a core value of the organization and a requirement of their funders.
Good information architecture is one of the most concrete ways a website can embody that value.
If you’re curious whether your site’s structure is working for you, get in touch. We’re happy to take a look.
See you next month!
With care,
Shayna (and the Maple team)
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