Web Site Architecture

Look at a paragraph Frank Lloyd Wright wrote in 1908 (reprinted in Frank Lloyd Wright, Collected Writings, Vo. 1):

“A building should contain as few rooms as will meet the condition which give it rise and under which we live, and which the architect should strive continually to simplify; the ensemble of the rooms should then be carefully considered that comfort and utility may to hand in hand with beauty.”

This observation becomes more interesting if you replace “building” with “web site” and “room” with “page”:

“A web site should contain as few pages as will meet the condition which give it rise and under which we live, and which the architect should strive continually to simplify; the ensemble of the rooms should then be carefully considered that comfort and utility may to hand in hand with beauty.”

This becomes interesting if you design to this web architecture. One design strategy is to put as much as possible in the Welcome page. Since this page often gets far more hits than other pages, the idea is to try to put lots of keywords and hyperlinks on the page.

The better idea is to simplify that Welcome page. Identify the key client problems the web site addresses and motivate the user to link through paths that could lead the viewer to the solution to those problems.

Unlike Frank Lloyd Wright’s building, however, we often also have the challenge of optimizing the page for the search engines. The “door” in our analogy is the “call to action”, which is a part of the title in the organic search engine and the ad text & graphics in a PPC or banner advertisement.