Established in 1956, the International Reading Association (IRA) represents over 300,000 educators in 99 countries. The association relies on its Web site to communicate its mission and assist its global membership with up-to-date information. Over the years, as the site expanded, it grew increasingly disorganized and difficult to use. Recognizing these problems, and with plans to automate the publishing of several journals online, the IRA asked Dynamic Diagrams to develop a new information architecture for the site and redesign its user interface.

Some professional associations choose to separate their publications from their organizational information. IRA took a different approach. With a wealth of information in manually-coded content pages, IRA asked for a solution that integrated the two bodies of content. Visitors would be able to search or navigate to specific topics and find the best information available, whether from a journal article, a book extract, or content created by the association's internal experts.

The architecture had to be scaleable, both to encompass the roll-out of future publications and the ongoing creation of pages on meetings, advocacy efforts, issues in the news, and other topics of interest to IRA members, educators, and the general public.

Working with IRA editors, we developed a content hierarchy that organized the site's pages and underpinned its new look and feel; features such as color coding the site's categories, efficient global and contextual menus, and effective labels all derive from the information architecture.

As the project moved into the implementation phase, our work dovetailed with the development of the back-end publishing tools used to manage the site. Both hand-built and automated pages use a common set of templates based on the site structure. These provide a consistent navigational shell for the entire Web site and ensure that the overarching structure is maintained as the site expands with new content and features.

 See the IRA Web site.