The Northwest Mountain School is a guide service based in Leavenworth, Washington specializing in skiing and climbing adventures. The company began in 1994 and is run by the husband and wife team of John and Olivia Race. They are both certified guides with a combined 40 years of guiding experience. They have both worked with larger guide services, but they created NMS to provide private and high-quality programs for their customers.
Thecurrent NMS websitehas a lot of content as they provide a wide variety of skiing and climbing programs and have a significant amount of content for these programs in addition to a calendar, a news blog, certification info, and online registration resources. The current navigation categories should be modified to reduce redundancy and clarify the services and information provided. Below is the site’s current navigation (there are several sub-sub levels of pages, so only gateway and sub-level pages are included below).
After reviewing competitor’s sites, it appears information architecture is a common issue for this industry as there was onlyone sitewhose navigation I believe to be well organized into appropriate categories.Another siteappears to have a similar navigation issues, but also has their main navigation panel on the lower left side of the site. Thelast siteI reviewed is a very well developed page with advanced techniques like parallax scrolling, but its navigation could be improved by consolidating as there are too many ways to get to the same pages and it appears overwhelming. After reviewing these sites and the NMS site, I came up with the following site map:
To assess the navigation of the site from the perspective of an average user, I formulated the following questions. These questions were then utilized to create the afnity diagram below, by grouping the questions under categories that seemed to be the most logical place to look for the answer.
I discovered while creating the afnity diagram that the sitemap I proposed in the top-down approach worked for main navigation categories, although I would suggest to NMS that their sub-level pages incorporate the answers to the questions above into their FAQ, which is currently minimal.
