How did we get around this one? We had to go back to the basics.
One of the aspects of building sites is that of information architecture.
“Designing the presentation of information to facilitate understanding.” - Tufte
In short, how, where and why you place navigation aspects of your site in order to ensure the best possible user experience. Whilst this a science in its own right, each and every web developer architects their products to some extent: some do it well, and some, well, not so well. To illustrate this aspect, consider the garden-variety blog. One of the reasons a blog works so well is that the information architecture is done by the time an user interacts with it - all that needs to happen is someone needs to start blogging and someone needs to start commenting.
Now you can choose an information architecture upfront.
We’ve architected 3 different sites for 3 different users-types, and built sites that we feel addresses these users best:
- Indy (for the individual)
- Biz (for a business)
- Org (for an organisation)
These sites are almost complete from an architecture point-of-view, and form an easy and approachable framework to kick-start a new site.
What happens when you add a new site to your account is that you can now choose to base your new site on one of these templates, and presto, your new site is now architected accordingly. All you have to do is add your own content.
We still cater for those who want to do their own thing: simply choose the Solo site template and you are on your own.
We really like this new feature. We hope you do too.