Site Mapping & Content/Data Structure

Planning a new website or a redesign? Starting to feel like your website content is unorganized? Frequently rebuilding and restructuring websites for clients? This post is for you!

Whether you’re managing website projects or simply working on your own website, it’s important to understand that how content is organized can dramatically impact a number of things related to the effectiveness of your website. A well-organized website is easier to manage, makes it easier for your visitors to find the information they’re looking for, will rank better and search results, and will naturally support and encourage website conversions. In contrast, a poorly organized website does none of those things – it can be frustrating or confusing to manage and navigate, and is likely to lead to decreased sales and signups.

In every project that we take on at Road Warrior Creative, a major piece of the discovery phase and website planning process is creating a sitemap and navigation structure for the website. This is one of my favorite parts of the website planning process. We frequently have clients some to us with existing WordPress websites that are not adequately taking advantage of the different features built into WordPress to help them best organize their content.

This meetup is all about how to best organize the content in your WordPress site. We’ll talk about:

• How to decide if something should be a page, post or custom post type
• When to nest pages or posts as “children” as another page or post
• How to effectively use categories, tags, and other taxonomies
• “Content Silos” and how URL structure (permalink settings) can impact search engine optimization

We’ll walk through several recent website projects from Road Warrior Creative and talk about how we approached assessing and organizing the content for each project, including a behind-the-scenes look at how we handle sitemaps, navigation structure, and redirects. Finally, we’ll briefly discuss some of the site mapping tools that are available and the pros/cons of the ones we’ve tried at RWC.

Join us tonight at 6PM at the Georgetown Public Library in classroom 211, upstairs. Or check back here later in the week for more information.