How to build a website structure and information architecture around customer needs, not complex internal departments.

Summary

A website often reflects the company behind it rather than the way customers look for information. Business units, product teams, marketing, support, regions, and practice areas each take responsibility for different parts of the customer experience. Over time, the site begins to mirror those internal divisions.

That structure may make sense to the organization, but customers do not arrive thinking about its org chart. They come with a need. They want to understand a product, solve a problem, compare options, decide what is right for them, make a purchase, or get help.

A better approach to website information architecture starts with those customer needs, decisions, and journeys. It connects content across internal silos, creating a website that is easier for people to navigate and increasingly easier for search engines and AI systems to understand.

Your website structure should be built around what customers are trying to do, not how the company happens to be organized.

What is website information architecture?

When people hear “information architecture or IA,” they often think about the website menu or the sitemap. Those things matter, but they are only part of it.

Website information architecture (IA) is really about how information is organized, labelled, connected, and made findable. It includes your categories, hierarchy, navigation, page relationships, filters, and the different paths people can take through the site.

You can have a very clean navigation and still have a confusing website underneath it. That’s why Maxinne Abuyuan’s approach is to ask: does the structure needs to match how customers actually think?

Why does website structure matter for customers?

Imagine someone comes to a wellness website because they are having trouble sleeping.

They may want to learn about sleep, understand different ingredients, compare products, read reviews, and figure out what is right for them. But inside the company, that information might live across completely different teams. To the customer, it is just one journey.

This is where a lot of website structures break down. The company sees separate departments and product portfolios. The customer sees one problem they are trying to solve.

Baymard’s ecommerce research has shown how important category structure and navigation are to helping people find products. If people cannot work out where something belongs, they may assume it is not available at all. That is not just a navigation problem, it’s an information architecture issue that needs fixing.

How should you organize website content around customer needs?

Max Abuyuan recommends starting with customer decisions rather than pages. Before moving things around in a sitemap, ask: What is the customer trying to understand, find, evaluate, choose, or do?

That might mean helping someone understand what you offer, find something relevant, explore their options, compare choices, build trust, make a decision, or get support. Those needs should shape the foundation of the website structure. Not which team created the page. Not how the business happens to be divided internally.

This also means there may need to be more than one way into the same information.

Someone might know the exact product they want. Someone else may only know the problem they are trying to solve. Another person may arrive through an article, a search result, or a recommendation.

A good website architecture can support all of those paths without creating a completely different experience for each one.

Should you design website navigation before the information architecture?

A lot of website redesign projects start with the menu. Teams sit around deciding what stays, what moves, and what goes under which heading.

But this process is backwards. First, get clear on what customers need and what they are trying to do. Then look through the content you already have. Find the gaps, remove duplication, group related content together, and make sure each piece helps move customers through their journey.

Then decide how the navigation should expose that structure.

A useful principle in Max Abuyuan’s approach to website information architecture is: Navigation is the output of the information architecture. It is not the information architecture itself!

How do you know if your website structure is organized around your company?

Your navigation uses internal department or business-unit language that may make perfect sense inside the company, but does not help customers find what they need. Similar content appears in multiple places because different teams created their own versions. Products that solve the same customer problem are separated. Helpful educational content is disconnected from the products or services it explains. And every department wants another item in the menu.

One of the clearest signs is that your sitemap only really makes sense after someone explains how the company works.

If that sounds familiar, the problem may not be the navigation itself. The structure underneath it may be organized around the business instead of the customer.

What should a customer-centred website structure look like?

For Max Abuyuan, the goal of customer-centred information architecture is not to eliminate the way a company operates internally. It is to stop making customers navigate those internal divisions.

Your teams can still have different responsibilities. Your business units can still exist. Product can still own product. Marketing can still own marketing. Support can still own support. But your customer should not have to understand any of that to use your website.

The same is increasingly true for AI systems. Search engines and AI assistants need clear, consistent, well-structured information to understand what your organization offers, how your products or services relate to one another, and which pages answer specific questions. When content is organized around internal silos, those relationships become harder for both people and machines to interpret.

Better information architecture helps AI systems identify entities, topics, categories, and connections across your website. It makes your content easier to retrieve, summarize, cite, and recommend because the underlying structure reflects meaningful customer needs rather than arbitrary organizational boundaries.

The organization can keep its silos. The website does not have to.

Your customer experiences one company. AI systems should be able to understand it that way too. Your website structure should feel like one coherent system for both.

Sources

Baymard Institute — E-Commerce Homepage & Category Navigation UX Research
Baymard Institute — A Guide to Information Architecture UX
Google Search Central — Help Google Understand Your Ecommerce Website Structure