How to get excited about information architecture

In this business, what gets clients excited is design. Unfortunately, that's usually one of the least important part of a Web project. The difficulty is to convince the client that the more time and effort spent on strategy and information architecture, the better the Web site. Obviously, good design is important to entice the reader, but without a good navigation system, site visitors will click away from your site frustrated not to be able to the find what they came for.

Focus on creating usable sites, rather than pure esthetics

People tend to prefer nice designs over bad designs. That's obvious. But they rarely would put esthetics over practicality (except for fashion, obviously). If a toaster is designed as a beautiful piece of (industrial) art, but it burns toasts every time you use it, it's not going to be a big seller. For Web sites, this means that beauty remains second to usability. Clients often are interested in getting samples from our previous work. We obviously have many of those, but we prefer to provide examples of good Web strategy and information architecture. Once you have those two pieces, it's easy to wrap a look that meets your corporate colors.