Most marketing site redesigns are information architecture fixes wearing a wig.
A team will say they want a "redesign" because the site feels stale. They'll engage a studio, pick a new colour palette, commission illustrations, debate typography. Six weeks later they ship something that looks fresh and converts at the same rate as the old one. The visuals changed. The problem didn't. The problem was the IA.
This is a guide to doing the architecture work first. It's the part that most teams skip, and the part that determines whether the new site actually works.
What "IA" means here
For an app, information architecture is about how features are grouped, how navigation reveals them, and how users build a mental model of the system.
For a marketing site, it's narrower and easier to get right. It's three questions:
- What pages exist?
- How does someone get from any page to the one they need?
- In what order does information appear on each page?
That's it. No taxonomies, no card-sorting workshops, no information-scent heat maps. Just those three questions, answered honestly.
The marketing-site failure modes are usually one of these:
- The pages exist but nobody can find them.
- The pages don't exist but should.
- The pages exist and the order of information on each one is wrong.
The IA crimes
A few patterns we see often:
The homepage tries to be every page. It has the hero, the features, the testimonials, the pricing, the case studies, the blog teaser, the team, and the contact form. The homepage is one page. It should be the answer to one question: "Why am I here?" Everything else is somewhere else.
Navigation has too many items. Five is the soft cap. Seven is the hard cap. If you have nine top-level items, you have a structure problem, not a navigation problem.
"Resources" is a dumping ground. When the team can't decide where something goes, it ends up in Resources. Eventually Resources contains the blog, the documentation, the case studies, the e-books, the templates, and a webinar from 2019. Users don't dig through Resources. Move each item to where it actually belongs.
The footer mirrors the navigation. This is a sign the navigation isn't doing its job. The footer is for low-traffic but high-trust items (privacy, terms, sitemap, social). It's not a second navigation.
Hidden pages. The pricing page exists but only one link points to it, from a tertiary nav menu nobody opens. Half the site is reachable only through search. If a page matters, it's no more than two clicks from any other page.
A method that works
We use four passes when designing IA for a marketing site. Each takes hours, not days. Skipping any of them is the source of the rework you'll do six months later.
Pass 1: Inventory
List every page the site needs. Not what it has. What it needs. Use a flat list, not a tree.
For most marketing sites the list is short:
- Home
- Each service or product (one page each)
- Each case study (one page each)
- About
- Contact
- Blog index + per-post
- Privacy and legal
The list is between 10 and 30 pages for most studios and consultancies. If your list is 60+, you might be building an editorial publication instead of a marketing site. That's a different project.
Pass 2: Pair the pages
For each page on the list, ask: who lands here, and what do they need next?
Concrete example: someone lands on a service page. They want one of:
- The pricing for this service
- Examples of similar work (case studies)
- A way to start a conversation (contact)
Three links matter from a service page: pricing, case studies, contact. Everything else is a distraction. So those three links go in obvious places. Everything else isn't on the service page.
Do this for every page. By the end you have a directed graph of who-goes-where. Where the edges cluster, you have navigation candidates. Where edges are sparse, you have orphans that should either be deleted or promoted.
Pass 3: The cardinality rule
Top-level navigation: five items. Maybe six. No more.
For most marketing sites the right five are:
- Services (or Products, or What we do)
- Work (or Case studies, or Portfolio)
- About
- Blog (or Journal, or Notes)
- Contact
You don't need a "Resources" item, a "Solutions" mega-menu, or a "Company" dropdown. The five-item cap forces clarity. If something doesn't make the cut, it's a sign it belongs inside another section or shouldn't be in the navigation at all.
Pass 4: On-page order
For each page, decide the order of sections. This is where most teams stop thinking and start designing.
The rule for a service or product page: answer the visitor's questions in the order they're asking them.
- What is this?
- Is it for me?
- What does it actually look like (examples, screenshots, deliverables)?
- How does it work (process, timeline)?
- What does it cost?
- How do I start?
Sometimes a page deviates because of business reasons (pricing high up because the audience is qualified, or social proof early because the brand is new and needs credibility fast). Those deviations should be deliberate, not accidental.
Read the page in order, and after each section ask "Did this answer the question I'd be asking right now?" If not, the section is in the wrong place.
A worked example
Take a fictional studio site. The team thinks they need a redesign. They engage us. We run the four passes.
Inventory: turns out they have 47 pages. Twelve of them are blog posts that should have been deleted three years ago. Eight are landing pages for old campaigns. Fifteen are "service" pages that overlap heavily (one for "web design," one for "website design," one for "custom website design"). The actual unique pages: 12.
Pairing: the team thought their About page was important. Pairing shows almost nobody goes from About to Contact. They do go from a service page to Contact. About is a destination, not a hub.
Cardinality: navigation had nine items. Reduced to five. Two old service pages got merged. The "Resources" menu got disassembled (blog moved to top nav, e-books and templates moved to a single Resources page reachable from the footer and the blog).
Order: every service page got reordered. Pricing moved from the bottom (where 60% of users never reached) to the third section. Testimonials moved from the top (felt premature, like protesting too much) to a single block before the CTA.
We didn't change the visual design. The site looked the same. Conversion went up 28%. The IA was the redesign.
What "done" looks like
Before any visual work starts, you have:
- A list of every page the site needs (around 10–30 for most marketing sites)
- A directed graph showing who-goes-where (between pages)
- A finalised top-level navigation with no more than 5–6 items
- For each page, an ordered list of sections that answer visitor questions in the right order
This document is the brief for the visual design. Without it, design work is decoration applied to a broken structure. With it, design work makes a working structure feel good to use.
A checklist
- Five (max six) items in the top navigation.
- No more than two clicks to reach any important page.
- "Resources" doesn't exist as a top-nav item.
- The homepage answers one question.
- Every page has been read in order with the "did this answer the question I'd be asking" test.
- Orphan pages have been promoted, demoted, or deleted.
- The footer holds privacy/legal/social, not a duplicate of navigation.
If you're staring at a site that "feels stale" and reaching for new fonts, run the four passes first. The wig isn't the problem.
If you want a site where the IA work is part of the project, not an upsell, see how we work on websites.