When you're building a website, you need structure. You need pages and subpages and subpages to those subpages. You need to create a top-level navigation that guides visitors to what they want or need. You need to create structure on your homepage and other landing pages. You need nice hierarchies and neat divisions. There’s no way around it.

It’s natural that people creating websites would seek out the nearest structure at hand. Organizations spend a lot of time focusing on operations. They have clear divisions and hierarchies, and stories that explain the relationships between them. People lead those divisions or departments. They have developed language to explain those departments to internal and external audiences, so of course it would make sense to use that structure as a guiding principle. So what could be more intuitive than modeling your website after your existing organizational chart?

But this is almost never the most helpful approach for your visitors. Your website navigation and content architecture should map to your audiences' motivations and goals. To serve them well, you need to get into their heads and really understand them. After all, your website isn't for you. 

Your website navigation and content architecture should map to your audiences' motivations and goals. 

Yes, your prospective employee might want to know how your organization is structured. But even then, communicating your operational structure probably isn’t the most salient or inspiring information for them. You want them to understand why they should want to work for you, and to put in an application for open positions. Customers and partners almost definitely don’t care. Your audience wants help with their problems. They want to see themselves reflected back. They crave the motivation to keep digging into your story.

Helping our clients move toward an audience-needs focus is the most satisfying part of our website strategy process. In another Insights article, we wrote about how to gather a list of those needs and how to organize them. In short, you’re looking to anticipate the most important and urgent questions, find a way to answer those questions quickly and efficiently, and get them to take the actions you want, whether it’s getting information, getting in touch, downloading, or buying. If your new website just accomplishes this goal, you've done the hardest and most important job. 

When it comes to structuring your website in a new way, you have to figure out how people self-identify. It might be a particular sector or their services needs. It might be where they are on a particular journey. This strategic positioning requires a new perspective. It means you need to create a more strategic way to present your services, products, and content that centers your audiences.

Making this shift is a big decision because you are essentially answering a fundamental marketing question about your customer. A lot of organizations and companies haven’t yet done this work. It can take a lot of coordinated effort to get it right, and it can invite potential conflict with internal stakeholders. For example, people who run divisions or departments often want their own webpage where they can say what they want to say. That’s a different paradigm from “We, the marketing team, are going to engage people in a new way, and you might not have a dedicated home on the site for your department.” That can be a tough sell. So the strategy has to be strong. And it can help to conduct user testing to validate it.

This often takes some deeper facilitation to get the alignment needed. We have dedicated working sessions with clients to workshop the information architecture to make sure that we’re creating the right journeys. 

This audience-centered approach makes all the difference in creating a website that truly connects with visitors. It can be hard for organizations to break out of their own mental models, but doing so provides immense value. When users can quickly feel seen, inspired, and easily find exactly what they need on your new website, it immediately engenders a deep sense of trustworthiness. 

If you’re about to redesign your website, consider that a valuable part of the design process is in recasting your organization chart into an audience-centered story. In our process, this rethinking takes place in the Website Strategy phase, where we take the time to orient the story toward audience motivations as they relate to an organization’s service or purpose. You’ll see the benefits as audiences feel heard and find pathways that speak to their needs.