Towards a Theoretical Framework for Understanding Website Information Architecture

Website information Architecture (IA) is an emerging discipline which focus on the principles of design and architecture in the digital landscape. However, the discipline is broadly being addressed by IA community of practices known as information architects. Many design principles and evaluation criteria that had been proposed for the development websites IA, generally lack theoretical background and justification. Several suggested measures in the discipline were based on existing practices with no explicit construct. This paper attempts to give a formal treatment of website IA through theoretical grounding from the architectural domain. The framework of architectural building understanding is inspired by the fundamental ideas of Vitruvius Theory developed more than 2000 years ago used to validate the construction of a building. Drawing this architectural theory and upon related dimension of IA studies, we argue that the theoretical grounding from architectural domain may be further specified to frame out the loosely thread of IA website design methodology and development.