Commercial Site Information Architecture

1) The problem this lesson solves

When a commercial site is governed only as a list of pages and menu labels, campaigns and teams can create destinations whose audience, intent, canonical identity, conversion handoff, owner and measurement state are no longer traceable together.

2) Lesson boundary

The owned artifact is Commercial Site IA Contract v1. This lesson does not own the preceding Anti-fork Customization or the following Plan Configurator and performs no live publishing, redirect or production-site mutation.

3) Fact: navigation should be clear and consistent

W3C WAI guidance emphasizes clear and consistent navigation, more than one way to find pages, orientation cues such as breadcrumbs and clear headings, and descriptive labels. These are usability and accessibility needs; they do not prescribe MAKNOW commercial taxonomy.

4) Fact: a canonical URL is a representative URL, not an absolute command

Google describes canonicalization as selecting a representative URL among duplicate or highly similar pages and uses signals such as redirects, sitemap inclusion and rel=canonical. A site can indicate its preference, while Google can still choose a different canonical.

5) Inference: IA needs stable page identity

If analytics stores only visible titles or button text, a rename can make history ambiguous. content_object_id and canonical_url let presentation change while identity and traceability remain stable.

6) Design: record Audience and Intent before the menu label

audience_segment and intent_class are separate from department names and navigation wording. A menu is one presentation of the IA, not its source of truth.

7) Make canonical decisions explicit for duplicates

A campaign request does not automatically justify a second public destination with almost identical commercial content. If overlap is high and no canonical decision exists, use HOLD_CANONICAL_UNRESOLVED.

8) Navigation, breadcrumbs and headings must not drift apart

Renaming a navigation item without updating breadcrumb, heading or measurement identity breaks orientation and auditability. That is REVISE_NAVIGATION_DRIFT, not READY.

9) Separate Entry Path from Canonical Destination

A new audience can receive a dedicated entry path without necessarily creating a new canonical commercial URL. The entry path describes how users arrive; the canonical destination identifies the governed public object.

10) Preserve intent through the CTA handoff

primary_cta must connect to a specific, traceable conversion_destination. Sending every CTA to a generic contact form that discards originating intent is not a verified handoff.

11) Do not use visible labels as measurement identity

measurement_event should be a durable key tied to content identity or conversion intent. Button text such as “Talk to sales” is not enough for reliable historical measurement.

12) Core Evidence Contract

This artifact has 21 dimensions, 17 critical. The compact table shows a baseline, an unresolved duplicate and a recomputed transfer case; JSON/CSV retains the complete field map.

13) Typed states prevent false READY

READY requires decisive evidence to be closed. HOLD_EVIDENCE_MISSING, HOLD_ACCESSIBILITY, HOLD_CANONICAL_UNRESOLVED and the REVISE_* states are valid outcomes and must not be coerced into success.

14) Owner and Approval are operational IA fields

Every content object needs an owner and approval state. A visually neat IA without ownership becomes unauditable when a product is renamed, a campaign conflicts with a canonical page or measurement identity drifts.

15) Lab and transfer

The lab contains eight fixtures and 48 assertions. In transfer, a new enterprise audience is added, a product is renamed and a campaign proposes a near-duplicate landing page. Recompute from the changed evidence so canonicalization, navigation, CTA handoff and measurement stay auditable without mutating COM-002 or COM-003 behavior.