August 20, 2001 New Thinking:
Broken links and poor information architecture design

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• A large number of websites are being closed down
• Websites are not being properly maintained
• Website information architecture is constantly being changed

Links are an essential infrastructure that allow web content to be navigable. Without links, you might as well pile all the billions of documents on the Web into one huge container. Link management is thus an important part of the activity of running a website. A broken link is a sign of an unprofessional website.

Study after study shows that people are becoming more conservative in their use of the Web. On a daily or weekly basis, they go to fewer and fewer websites. One probable reason is that many people see much of the Web as a mismanaged hit-and-miss affair. People have become very skeptical. A broken link is a guaranteed way to feed that skepticism.

In the process of putting the archives for this newsletter on my website I had to check external reference links. Roughly 70 percent of those links were broken when I tested them. In 2000, Andrei Broder, vice president of research at search engine AltaVista, estimated that as many as 20 percent of web links that are more than a year old may be out of date.

As part of the maintenance of your website, it is important to use software that will check the integrity of your links. However, links can break or misdirect for a variety of reasons, so schedule a comprehensive check of all links at least once a year.

Some months ago, I had reason to bookmark specific pages on a number of websites. When I re-used these links recently, I was amazed to find out how many didn’t work because the information architecture of these websites had been changed.

Evolutionary design has for years been the hallmark of website design. You got the website up, saw how it worked, changed it, saw how that worked, and so on. The problem is that websites that are constantly evolving are confusing to someone who is trying to find their way around them. ‘I knew where this page was last week but now they’ve moved it’ is not a happy refrain.

Constantly evolving a website often means trashing the old version and building a new from scratch. This approach was all well and good in the early days when everyone was learning the ropes. However, it is very expensive and time consuming for the organization, and genuinely frustrating for the person who visits the website. It is doubly frustrating for the regular visitor, who in all likelihood is a customer - the last person you want to frustrate.

The Web is eight years old. The basic rules of website design are now in place (or should be). It is time that information architecture should be treated as if it were ‘written in stone’ rather than designed on the back of a beer mat.

The websites that need to constantly change their information architecture have in all likelihood not spent the time to plan how they want their content organized. Time spent up front designing a robust and scaleable classification and navigation saves money, time and effort in the long-term. It will result in a better experience for the person who uses the website.


Gerry McGovern


Note: Due to summer holidays, the next issue of New Thinking will be on September 3, 2001.

 

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