Determine individual site content needs and structure

Applies To: Windows SharePoint Services 3.0

 

Topic Last Modified: 2006-09-07

In this article:

  • Formal: Survey stakeholders and users

  • Informal: Rough organization with room to evolve

Creating a site is a quick process, but deciding what content to put in the site and how to organize the content so that it is useful takes some time. You can approach this task in many ways, but two recommended ways are:

  • Formal method   Survey your stakeholders and users to determine what they want to see in the site. Follow this formal process if you are creating a large or strategic site, with multiple audiences coming to it for different needs. It takes careful planning and review to ensure that all audiences can come to the site, find what they need, contribute appropriately, and continue with their work.

  • Informal method   Begin with a rough organization for the site, and from there, let it evolve based on user needs and feedback. Follow this informal process if you have a small, more casual collaboration site where most of the users are working on the same set of tasks in a similar way.

In the Determine objectives for sites article, you identified the objectives that most closely aligned with your site needs. Use these objectives to help you identify a method for determining your individual site content and structure.

  • Document storage site   Depending on anticipated complexity, you might want to follow either the formal or informal method. If you are building a large site to store documents from several disparate teams, then you should approach the task of organization formally. If this is just a small storage space for working documents used by your team, then an informal process might suffice.

  • Communication site   You might need to follow the more formal method and determine exactly who is coming to the site for what information, and how to guide them there.

  • Collaboration site   You can probably follow the informal method, allowing the site to grow and evolve as needed.

The following sections explain the process for each method.

Formal: Survey stakeholders and users

If you need to pursue a formal planning process for your sites, you need to create a formal planning committee to obtain input from stakeholders and to perform the following steps:

  1. Determine audience needs by performing an audience and stakeholder survey. Find out what information each audience segment or stakeholder expects to see or interact with.

  2. Determine content needs by performing a content survey. Review and inventory current content, content planned for the future, and underused or hard-to-find content, and estimate the expected change in content over time.

  3. Design your information architecture. Include which lists or libraries are needed to organize information, what needs to be promoted on home pages, and whether or not you need custom navigation to expose the information architecture to site users.

  4. Ask your target users and stakeholders to review prototypes of the information architecture. Evaluate whether they find the information they need in your prototype.

Performing a content survey

Prior to planning your site structure, you must understand the content that you already have in your organization. By conducting a survey of your current content, you can identify content needs and design and deploy a solution that addresses those content needs. There are several specific elements you should include in your content survey, including:

  • Number of documents.

  • Location of documents.

  • Document types, both in terms of file types and classification.

  • People and business structure.

  • Content approval processes and workflow.

You can use your content survey to prioritize important content and suggest a structure for that content. Content planning usually proceeds in stages. In the first stage, you make large-scale structural decisions, such as which divisions or projects have separate content needs and how many sites are needed for each separate body of content. Then, content planning teams for each site, usually aligned to divisions or projects, decide on the appropriate structure to address the content needs at their level. This might require revision of the large-scale structure as new content needs are identified. You might go through several planning stages before deployment, and continue to plan for changes even after your sites are operational.

Informal: Rough organization with room to evolve

When you are creating an informal site, you can start out with a less rigid process, which might include the following steps:

  1. If you are integrating existing content into a new site, take some time to evaluate what content you have and what you want to put into the site.

  2. Then, generate ideas about what you think the site should include and create a "must have" list. For example, a team collaboration site might include:

    • Documents (project documents, plans, proposals, presentations, bids — anything that your team needs to read or contribute to).

    • Team schedules (holiday schedules, individual work and vacation schedules, project schedules, and so on). You can log shared events on your site and display then in Calendar view.

    • Contact information (team members, partners, customers, suppliers and vendors, and so on). You can create separate contact lists for internal and external contacts, or mix them by using fields that you can sort and filter.

    • Tasks or assignments (identify who is doing what).

    • Frequently used links to other Web sites (including sites about related projects or teams).

    • Important announcements or news that your whole team needs to hear about.

    • A blog — perhaps as the public face for your collaboration site.

  3. Review any user scenarios you might have and think about what you might look for in the site if you were a particular user.

  4. Add any missing elements to your original list, and if possible, have the list reviewed by a few target users.

After you have identified the rough elements, you can get started with the site, and let the team members work on the organization as they go.