Automatic Web Site Authoring with SiteGuide

An important step in the design process for a web site is to determine which information is to be included and how the information should be organized on the web site’s pages. In this paper we describe ’SiteGuide’, a tool that automatically produces an information architecture for a web site that a user wants to create. SiteGuide takes as input URLs of web sites from the same domain as this target site and creates a model based on the common topics and structural features in these example sites. The tool presents this model to the user in various formats and it serves as a starting point for the information architecture of the new web site. Evaluation shows that SiteGuide is able to detect a large part of the common topics in example sites and to present these topics in an understandable form to its users. Web site set-ups made by amateur web designers that have used the SiteGuide’s suggestions are of a higher quality than those made without the help of SiteGuide.