Information architecture: the site plan

Why structure before writing

Because retro-fitting structure means changing URLs, and changing URLs means redirects, and redirects mean the migration work described in Module 22, URLs, redirects and migrations. Getting the structure approximately right at the start is one of the cheapest decisions in this entire course, and getting it wrong is one of the most expensive to undo.

Structure also does work that writing cannot. It tells a reader what kind of place they are in and what else exists. It tells a search engine which pages are important and how they relate. And it forces the discipline of deciding what a page is for, because a page with no obvious parent usually has no obvious reader either.

Five sections, no more

The sections that earn their place in almost every clinic site are these.

• Treatments. One page per treatment you compete on, from the build list in Module 07, Choosing the treatments to compete on.
• Concerns. One page per problem as a patient describes it, serving stage one of the journey.
• The clinic. Who works here, what standards apply, what the appointment is like, fees, policies.
• Answers. The question pages built in Part IV.
• Locations, only if you genuinely have more than one, and never as a device for covering towns you do not operate in.

Anything that does not fit one of those five is usually either a page that should not exist or a page that belongs inside one of them. Resist the sixth section; it is nearly always a symptom of an unmade decision.

Treatments and concerns

These are different pages for different readers and the distinction is worth labouring, because collapsing them is a very common error.

A treatment page is named after the procedure and is read by somebody who already knows what they want. A concern page is named after the problem, in the patient's words, and is read by somebody at stage one who does not yet know what the fix is called. The concern page's job is to explain the problem, describe the range of things that can be done about it, and link to the treatment pages. It is not a second treatment page with a different title.

You need both only where the patient's word and the clinical word genuinely differ. Where they are the same, one page is correct, and creating two is the duplication problem search engines resolve by choosing one and ignoring the other, as Module 20, Crawling and indexing: what actually blocks you explains.

The three-click rule

Every page a patient might need should be reachable from the homepage in three clicks or fewer. This is not a ranking rule; it is a usability rule with a search side effect, which is that pages buried deeply are crawled less often and understood as less important.

In a clinic site the rule is easy to satisfy because the site is small. It is broken most often by accident: a page added through a booking system that appears in no menu, a concern page linked only from a blog post, an answer page linked only from a sitemap. Module 23, Internal linking as structure treats internal linking as a structural task for exactly this reason.

Naming and URL patterns

Pick a pattern and hold it. A workable one for a clinic:

Three rules for the words themselves: lower case, hyphens between words, and no dates, years, campaign names or internal jargon. A URL is a promise that the page will still be there, and anything in it that will expire is a promise you have already broken.

Structure that survives growth

The test of a structure is what happens when you add the twentieth treatment or the second premises. A structure with five sections and one level of depth absorbs both without change. A structure organised around this year's priorities does not.

Two habits keep it durable. Add pages to existing sections rather than creating new ones, and when a section exceeds roughly a dozen pages, look for a genuine sub-grouping rather than inventing one. And when you are tempted to create a section for a campaign, create a page instead and let it sit where its subject belongs.

With the plan drawn, Part III begins the actual writing, starting with the page type that carries most of the commercial weight.