Information Architecture to Lock Before You Design

Information architecture is the blueprint. Get it wrong and users get lost. Get it right and every page has a clear purpose and a path. Design comes after. Start in Figma and you decorate a structure you haven’t decided.

B2B sites fail IA when they copy a brochure: Home, About, Services, Contact. That works for five pages. It breaks when you add industries, case studies, and a blog. Pages pile up as one-offs. Buyers can’t find specs. Google can’t map the site.

Sitemap First

Build the sitemap before components. Write it as a tree, not a slide.

Hierarchy

Home → sections → pages. A typical mid-market B2B tree:

• / — Homepage. Promise, proof, path.
• /services/ — Index plus children: /services/web-design, /services/seo-growth.
• /industries/ — Vertical pages: /industries/manufacturing, /industries/ecommerce.
• /work/ — Case studies. One URL per engagement.
• /resources/blog/ — Articles. Optional hub pages for topics.
• /contact — One form, one job.

If a page doesn’t sit in that tree, it shouldn’t exist yet. Or it needs a parent.

Depth

Don’t bury money pages. Decision rule:

• Key commercial pages — 3 clicks from home, max. Services, industries, contact.
• Supporting pages — 4 clicks is fine. A single case study, a blog post.
• 5+ clicks — Something is wrong. Flatten or add a hub.

Depth is not the same as URL length. /industries/manufacturing is two segments and one click from a nav dropdown. /page?id=47 is one segment and unusable.

No Orphans

Every URL needs an inbound path: nav, footer, hub, or in-content link. Orphans don’t get traffic. If a campaign page must go live, link it from the matching service or industry page.

Navigation

Nav is IA made clickable. It is not a sitemap dump.

Primary

5–7 items. That’s the limit most people can scan in a header.

A working set: Work, Services, Industries, Resources, About, Contact. Drop empty items. Don’t invent a “Solutions” dropdown to look bigger.

The last item is the action. Contact or Start a project. Not another informational link.

Secondary

Use dropdowns or a mega-menu when a section has 4+ children. Rules:

• Services and industries — List the real pages. Link the index too (“All services”).
• Resources — Blog, guides, maybe a tools page. Don’t mix case studies in here if Work is already in the header.
• No mega-menu of 30 links — That’s a sitemap, not navigation. If you have that many, you need hubs, not a wider dropdown.

Footer

Repeat key commercial links. Services, industries, contact, legal. Redundant is fine.

Don’t put unique, important pages only in the footer. If it matters, it belongs in the sitemap and a hub.

URL Structure

URLs are IA that persists after you redesign the header.

Clean

/services/web-design not /page?id=47. No session IDs. No .html. No /index.php/services.

Descriptive

The path should match the page. /industries/manufacturing is a manufacturing page. /solutions/s3 is a guess.

Use the words buyers search. If they search “B2B web design,” the service URL should say web-design, not digital-experiences.

Consistent

Pick a pattern and keep it:

• /services/{service}
• /industries/{industry}
• /work/{project}
• /resources/blog/{slug}

Don’t mix /service/web-design and /services/seo. Don’t split case studies across /work/ and /blog/. Inconsistency breaks later redirects.

Avoid dates in blog URLs. /resources/blog/core-web-vitals-b2b ages better than /blog/2024/01/core-web-vitals.

How to Decide Before Design

1. List jobs — What should a technical buyer, a commercial buyer, and a returning prospect do?
2. Map pages to jobs — One primary job per URL. A service page sells the service. A case study proves it. Don’t merge them.
3. Name URLs — Write the paths. If you can’t name it cleanly, the page is confused.
4. Draw nav — Only then. Nav is a subset of the sitemap.
5. Check orphans and depth — Then hand the tree to design.

IA is growth infrastructure. It decides what you can rank, what you can measure, and what you can add without a rebuild. Skip it and every later page is a patch.

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We build IA from the ground up. Start a project and we’ll map your sitemap before anyone opens a design file.