Information ArchitectureConsultancy

Information architecture is the work that happens before wireframes and design: deciding how content is grouped, how users move through it, and how the underlying structure supports both the people reading the site and the people maintaining it.

For small brochure sites it rarely needs much thought. For larger projects (organisations with multiple services, products, regions, audiences, or years of legacy content) it’s often the single most important phase of the project. Get the architecture right and the design work that follows is straightforward. Get it wrong and no amount of visual polish will make the site easy to use.

When IA work matters most

We factor information architecture into every project, but it becomes a distinct phase on briefs like:

Large content migrations. Moving a site with hundreds or thousands of pages from a legacy CMS to Craft CMS is not just a technical exercise. It’s an opportunity to rethink how content is grouped, what should be kept, what should be retired, and how the new structure will hold up as the organisation grows.

Multi-audience sites. Organisations serving distinct audiences (businesses and consumers, members and non-members, UK and international, multiple brands under one umbrella) need an architecture that lets each audience find their path without the site feeling fragmented.

Complex service offerings. When an organisation offers dozens of services, products, or programmes, the way they’re categorised on the site directly affects discoverability. We help work out the taxonomy, the navigation, and the relationships between related items.

Editor workflows. Good IA isn’t only about visitors. It’s also about the people who maintain the site, making sure the content model in the CMS matches how editors think about their work, so updating the site feels natural instead of frustrating.

How we approach it

A typical IA phase starts with a short discovery exercise: stakeholder conversations, a content audit of the existing site, and a review of analytics to understand how people currently behave. From there we propose a structure, test it against real user tasks, and iterate before any design or development work begins.

Deliverables usually include a site map, a content model, a navigation proposal, and a set of user journeys showing how the most important tasks flow through the new structure. These become the brief for the design phase that follows.

Where it fits

Information architecture is part of our wider consultancy offering, and is often combined with user testing and project scoping on larger briefs. It can be delivered as a standalone piece of work (useful if you’re planning a redesign and want the structural thinking in place before going out to tender) or as the first phase of a full website project we deliver end-to-end.

Get in touch if you’d like to talk through what IA work could look like for your project.