Information architecture visio template

Helping our partners and customers design and architect new solutions is important. Architecture diagrams like those included in our guidance can help communicate design decisions and the relationships between components in an environment. We use a set of symbols and icons along with Visio templates to create the architecture diagrams we product and are providing these tools here to help you build a custom architecture diagram for your next solution. You can see these icons, symbols, and templates in action in downloadable files available on the following pages:.

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Privacy policy. Having a solid information architecture is an important prerequisite for realizing a well-maintained and well-performing portal. Designing the optimal structure requires detailed planning. If not done properly, you can adversely affect user adoption or have significant performance issues; the likelihood of both is very possible. After you know more about the users, the content, and the portal's intended usage, you will have a good foundation to start with and can possibly avoid some of the common pitfalls around information architecture.

Information architecture is not a one-time process, rather, it a continuous process. While an optimal information architecture may not always be obvious to end-users, a poorly designed and managed information architecture will certainly be remembered if the experience is a bad one.

Keep measuring, keep evolving, and keep it relevant and fresh. Although this guidance primarily targets SharePoint Online, most of it also applies to portals hosted in an on-premises SharePoint environment. This article is not meant to go deep into every aspect of governance and information architecture. The following list contains the key things not to do when you design your portal information architecture.

The following sections address some key areas that you should consider when building your information architecture. Consider minimizing the number of top-level site collection nodes and the number of subsite levels within your information architecture.

In the past, we promoted flattening hierarchies into potentially several separate site collections; reasons included factors such as IA best practices, menu structures, content database management, and capacity. As far as capacity is concerned, that is no longer relevant with SharePoint Online. However, there are other considerations now, such as URL limitations.

For more information, see SharePoint Online limits. Recommended patterns include grouping site collections and sites into different logical groupings such as Enterprise level and publishing sites. These might include search centers, records centers, and ediscovery centers.

For example:. Usually, not everything migrates to the cloud immediately and all at once, so plan for a hybrid IA and evolve as necessary. Note: Companies mentioned in this article may or may not be advertisers on this site.

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You might also check out WebSort. Part of the studies is to curate material for one content page of a collaboratively created Web presence. To help visitors of the Web presence to quickly find material that is of particular interest to them, we are supposed to suggest an information architecture and to justify our solution.

Thanks for giving some focus on what to try out, recommending the above tools. About Advertise Contact. Useful Usability. Sign in. Forgot your password?

Get help. Password recovery. Information Architecture Usability Resources. A handy list of 8 Free tools for good information architecture and usability For web sites, information architecture is the way content is organized and categorized on the site. Information Architecture and eCommerce web sites: Think about information architecture and usability as it relates to an eCommerce site: If your web site information architecture is good, but your usability task-flow is bad, your web site visitors will be able to find what they are looking for but will eventually have to muddle through the buy-flow tasks, resulting in mediocre conversion.