IA Primer: Landing, List, & Detail Pages

Todd Toler — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 16:49:13 +0000

From an information architecture point of view, it’s convenient to think of most website structures as a collection of three primary types of pages – landing pages, list pages, and detail pages. Everyone has seen plenty of examples of each of these, and the first two are often combined – making the issue somewhat blurred. A landing page is the type of page you typically see when you are either on the home page or a main category page of a site. It tends to be a page you pass through to get to a site’s full organization of content or products, which are organized as a series of list pages (screens designed to browse multiple choices with limited information about each one) and detail pages (screens devoted to a single product, article, etc.) Sort of like billboards, landing pages are typically plastered with feature boxes touting services, featured content or products, or smaller curated lists of links based on some attribute a designer thinks a user cares about (such as “most emailed”, “best selling,” “new,” etc.) Their layout is invariably some variation on the tiled or stacked boxes approach – a design choice made when the primary goal is to provide a layout where the designer has a lot of flexibility in assigning different visual importance to various elements. List and detail pages, on the other hand, are exactly as they sound – a framework to systematically display and organize items on a website.

A Typical Landing>List>Detail Page Progression at www.BestBuy.com

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IA Primer: Landing, List, & Detail Pages