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Ignited Nepal audits and rebuilds the page hierarchy, navigation structure, and content organisation of Canadian B2B, government, and multi-service organisation websites. We handle the specific structural challenges of bilingual French and English site architecture and the sprawl that comes from navigation decisions made by consensus rather than by design.
Your site serves multiple distinct audience groups: residents, businesses, service applicants, contractors, and media. The navigation reflects the internal structure of the organisation rather than the tasks any of these audiences came to complete. You have a legal obligation to serve both English and French speakers, and the French version of the site has not been updated with the same consistency as the English version. You need a documented IA that can survive a change of web team and a change of CMS.
You provide services across several distinct practice areas or industry sectors and your navigation has grown as each team has advocated for its own section of the site. The result is a top-level navigation with eight items and sub-menus that run to fifteen links each. New clients who do not already know your business cannot orient themselves quickly enough to stay. You need a structure that reflects what clients need rather than what your organisational chart looks like.
You have a French site and an English site that are nominally the same organisation but have developed separately over time. Pages exist in one language that do not exist in the other. Navigation labels differ not just in language but in meaning. The URL structures are inconsistent. You are planning a rebuild and you want both versions built from a shared structural blueprint rather than managed as two separate websites that happen to share a domain.
In Canadian B2B and public sector organisations, website navigation is often the product of committee decisions in which each department or division secures a top-level navigation item as a proxy for organisational visibility. The resulting navigation reflects internal politics rather than user journeys. Visitors who do not know the organisation in advance have no reliable way to predict which menu item contains what they need.
Many bilingual Canadian websites were built with English as the structural primary and French added as a translation layer. When pages are added or reorganised in English, the French version is updated with a delay or not at all. The French navigation drifts out of structural alignment with the English navigation. French-speaking visitors experience a different and generally inferior version of the same site.
Multi-service organisations and government sites tend to develop deep page hierarchies over time: four and five levels of sub-pages, content buried so far from the navigation that it is effectively invisible to visitors who are not searching for it directly. Deep hierarchies are not inherently a problem. They become a problem when there are no breadcrumbs, no contextual navigation, and no clear structural logic that tells a visitor where they are in relation to the rest of the site.
Content audits of large Canadian B2B and government sites regularly reveal that a single service or topic is covered across three to six separate pages: a landing page, a detail page, a legacy page from a previous campaign, a news article, and a resource download that duplicates the landing page content. Each of these pages carries a fraction of the ranking authority that a single consolidated page would carry.
We run a structured workshop with your key stakeholders. For bilingual organisations we run it in a way that gives equal weight to the French and English versions from the outset. We establish the primary audiences, their tasks, the content inventory, and the business objectives for each language version. The workshop output is the shared brief from which the full IA is built.
We catalogue every page on your current site in both language versions. We document the URL, title, purpose, traffic data where available, and structural relationship between corresponding French and English pages. We flag duplicates, orphans, structurally inconsistent pages across language versions, and pages with thin or competing content.
We map the primary user journeys for each audience segment in both language versions. For government and multi-service organisations this typically involves four to six distinct audience segments with different entry points and different conversion actions. The journey maps identify the pages required for each journey and the navigational connections between them.
We produce a sitemap that treats English and French as parallel primary structures rather than original and translation. Each page is listed with its English title, its French title, its URL in both language versions, its position in the hierarchy, and its content type. The sitemap is the single source of structural truth for both versions.
We write and test navigation labels in English and French. French labels are not translated from English originals. They are written first in French for French-speaking audiences, then the English equivalents are written separately. Both sets of labels are tested against the tasks identified in the discovery workshop.
We produce structural outlines for each content type across both language versions. For government and public sector sites this includes service page templates, transaction page templates, information page templates, and news and announcement templates. Each template outline specifies the sections a page of that type requires and the purpose of each section.
We document the URL architecture for both language versions including the approach to language segmentation, slug format in English and French, hreflang tag mapping, and redirect plan for legacy URLs. For organisations with long URL histories, the redirect plan is often the most consequential technical deliverable in the entire IA process.
We map the internal linking architecture for both language versions. For multi-service organisations and government sites, internal linking is how you connect high-traffic informational pages to lower-traffic transactional pages. This connection is rarely planned systematically. We document it as an implementable instruction set.
We package all deliverables into a bilingual design handover document. The design team receives structural briefs for both language versions alongside the sitemap, user journeys, navigation labels, and URL structure.
We assess both language versions of your current site against five criteria: navigation logic, bilingual content parity, page hierarchy, URL structure, and internal linking. We identify the three to five structural issues most affecting your site's performance and the specific inconsistencies between language versions. This takes five working days.
We run a structured workshop with stakeholders from both the English and French sides of the content operation. We establish audiences, tasks, inventory, and business objectives for both versions in a single session.
We catalogue content in both language versions with parallel documentation so structural inconsistencies are visible immediately. We map user journeys for each audience segment in both languages.
We produce the parallel sitemap and independently-written navigation labels for both languages. Both are presented for stakeholder review in a single session so decisions about one version are made with awareness of their implications for the other.
We produce template outlines for each content type and the URL architecture for both language versions including hreflang mapping and redirect plan.
We map internal links for both language versions and document the cross-language linking strategy including language switcher behaviour.
We deliver the bilingual design handover package and brief the design team on the structural requirements for each language version.
Federal government organisations and federally regulated businesses in Canada have obligations under the Official Languages Act. For private sector B2B organisations the obligation depends on sector, size, and provincial context. Regardless of legal obligation, if a meaningful proportion of your audience is French-speaking, serving them from a structurally inferior version of your site is a commercial disadvantage as well as a reputational one.
This is one of the most important aspects of bilingual IA work. French navigation labels are not translations of English labels. They are written independently for a French-speaking audience. Where a direct structural equivalent does not exist in natural French usage, the label is written to serve the same navigational purpose using French-native language. The result is two navigations that correspond structurally but read naturally in their respective languages.
A content audit will document the gap precisely. The IA process produces a sitemap that shows what should exist in both versions. Pages that do not yet exist in French are flagged as content creation requirements. The IA does not produce the French content, but it gives the content team a precise brief for what needs to be written and where each new page sits in the hierarchy.
We begin with audience segmentation rather than with the organisational structure. We identify each distinct audience group, the tasks they come to complete, and the content they need to complete those tasks. The navigation and hierarchy are then built to serve those tasks, with internal audience routing handled through homepage design and content signposting rather than through the top-level navigation.
Yes. The IA document specifies structure, hierarchy, URLs, labels, and templates independent of any specific CMS. It is the instruction set that tells the development team what to build regardless of which platform they are building on.
Not a black box. Real specialists you can call, with their names on the work.
If your French version is structurally behind your English version, if your navigation has grown by committee, or if you are planning a replatform and want to do it without inheriting the old structural problems, the IA Diagnostic is the right first step. Five working days, both language versions assessed, and a clear picture of what the fix involves before any commitment to a larger scope.
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