Is Your Web Design Architecture More Like a Ranch House or a McMansion

If the internet were Zillow, would your web design be the lovely house on the corner, the DIY dumpster fire, or the out-of-place McMansion? Is your website a reasonably priced mid-century Craftsman in a good school district, or is it that overpriced chalet with the dungeon basement and haunted doll room?

“Which One Would You Be?” is a silly exercise, but it can still provide an informative look at our website architecture. Like buildings, website architecture can tell us a lot about its occupants.

I live in a community with three distinct phases of development — the original rural development, a suburban boom in the early 2000s, and a recent explosion of modern new builds and renovations.

Farmhouses pepper the city, and the neighborhood streets wind past mid- to late-century ranch houses. Built along rural irrigation creeks and amongst shaded areas (it’s hot here), the original architecture is cozy and fits into the natural geography.

Then there are the gated communities with McMansions. They have all of the elements of a fancy house without any of the poise or history. They have balconies, turrets, a pool, hedgerows, a tennis court, an atrium, a pull-through garage and connected outbuilding/guest suite, and a random alcove. But none of it goes together. None of it has a purpose. Now, the turret houses stacks of magazines, and the alcove is impossible to keep clean.

Are the McMansions more valuable? Sure. Is it an overwhelming structure that’s a pain to maintain? Yeah, and a bit of an eyesore. It says, “Hey, look, we have everything!”

Most recently, folks with more modern tastes and new money built massive zero-lot-line, neo-modern concrete and glass homes on the few lots left—and most of those lots were vacant for a reason. There are huge houses every few blocks, crowding neighboring lots and sticking out.

Are the modern houses nicer? Absolutely, and they probably have heated floors. But they are intrusive and misaligned. They communicate, “I want to live here, but I want to change everything about here first.”

Building materials aside, web development and homebuilding share many similarities — which is probably where we get the term website architecture. 

What Is Website Architecture, and Why Should I Care?

In a home, the architecture is what holds each individual component together. The same applies to web design. Your website architecture is both the literal structure and the common narrative thread.

In theory, website architecture is a hierarchical list of all your web pages. Your home page links to products, services, about, and resource pages. Each of those pages links to another subset of pages. Website architecture helps search engines understand and index your website content so it’s easier for the right people to find. 

It’s like a family tree — but for your web pages.

But in reality, your website architecture is the bones of your website’s story — the narrative visitors use to navigate your site.

The three most significant elements of website architecture are strategy, user experience, and storytelling. All three go hand in hand to lead to successful web development.

When you build your website architecture around brand narrative, you create a user experience that brings your brand to life while making your website more engaging for visitors. So how do you do that? You start with a strategy.

Set the Stage for Web Development with Clear Creative Direction

Building your website will be much easier if you start with a clear creative direction. Your web design should not be a collection of features but a user flow complimented by intentional design elements and functionality features.

The creative strategy should answer three questions:

1. Target Audience – Who do you want to attract to your website?
2. Website Goal – What do you want them to do when they arrive?
3. Web Design Strategy – How will you guide them through to the goal?

And the added benefit is that web development becomes a much easier task with a creative direction in place. The creative strategy serves as an outline for each task and project along the way.

Without an overarching creative direction, your web design to-do list says:

• Build a sales page
• Restructure the menu
• Make a blog

But if you have clear creative direction, your web design to-do list says:

• Build a landing page targeted at potential enterprise clients, asking them to share their email addresses.
• Update the menu to reflect our customer sales journey.
• Design two blog templates to reflect our strategy of posting lists and how-tos. 

Creative direction ensures that each piece has a purpose that works toward a common goal. Plus, creating something new is much easier with an outline. Trust me, I’m doing it right now.

Streamline Web Design for a Seamless User Experience

With a solitary goal and narrative, you can streamline your web design process, which leads to a seamless end-user experience and saves time on the development side. 

Your creative strategy should begin and end with the user in mind. They’re here. How are you going to guide them to your ultimate destination? What story are you going to tell to get them there?

Think about the times you’ve left a website because a link was broken or the navigation was complicated. You were fully bought into the user experience, and then a clunky or overly complex piece of design got in the way. It distracted you from the story. 

Going into the web development process with an overarching creative strategy keeps your final website streamlined. The singular focus eliminates unnecessary elements that otherwise serve as distractions. 

Creative Strategy, User Experience, and Storytelling have Exponential Benefits

A good strategy is helpful, and a good story is compelling. Combined, you can create a user experience that turns leads into conversions. But when you approach them individually, you may send conflicting messages.

Your headline may say, “We’re easy to work with.” A menu with 1,000 links tells a different story: “We’re a little disorganized.” 

But telling a better story with your website architecture and user experience doesn’t have to be complicated. In fact, once you try it, you’ll realize building a piecemeal website is more arduous.

Each element of story-first web architecture informs the next, so simply take it one step at a time:

1. Strategy – Decide who is coming to your site and what they should do.
2. Story – Convince your visitor to take the desired action by breaking the process into narrative steps.
3. User Experience – Invite your visitor to participate in each step of the story. 

Do you see how each element helps create the next?

Your brand narrative goes beyond your icon and website color choice. Every element of your website tells a story, from your homepage to the call-to-action buttons — even the mismatched third-party plugins.

The best brands integrate narrative into every element of their organization. The same is true for websites. Your colors and designs should match your brand standards, but so, too, should the framework on which the site is built. The site’s architecture tells as much of a story as the words on the page.

Do You Need Help Turning Your McMansion into a Website?

Are you stuck on your creative web design strategy? Do you need help finding the narrative in your McMansion website architecture? 

At Content Workshop, we help brands build story-first websites that direct their visitors through predetermined, narrative user flows.

Contact one of our strategists to see how we can help you with story-first web design.