A Research of Information Architecture and Design Methods for Academic Society’s Website

In Japan, there are currently more than 600 academic societies and most of these societies do not have their respective websites developed by professional web-masters. In many instances, there is a lack of clearly understandable information architecture and methods of website design are generally weak. In recent years, a number of useful web-developing software applications have been simplified and many complicated tasks cannot be completed without the expertise of system engineers. The authors attempted to conduct a research on many academic societies relative to how these societies deal with information architecture and related design methods. We have developed a model website and have proposed an ideal website prototype so that members of other academic societies may explore the model in the developments of their own websites in accordance with their own needs.