What is Website Architecture? Detailed Overview of 3-Tier Architecture

Gone are the days when businesses just used simple websites to show their companies’ products and services. Businesses are building amazing websites with plethora of features, user experience, functionalities, analytics, behavioural analysis, lead funnelling, chat bots, AI modules, and so on. The businesses offer most exciting & engaging experience to the visitors of the website by implementing the most advanced features. For a web design & development agency, it is imperative to use website architecture as the key to gain customer confidence & use the most organized way to build the enterprise website.

Website architecture is a vast topic and detailing the topic may need various articles and hence the article covers the basic definition and the tiers of website architecture. The idea is very innovative and guarantees perfect outcomes for large, corporate, enterprise websites.

A website architecture circulates around the usability, user interface, business logic, applications, data and experience. So, website architecture refers to the way we structure the website to assure that we meet our business goal while offering utmost experience to the users. In simple words, website architecture is used in creating a well-planned and logical layout of websites to meet business requirements.  Just like to construct the large building, the architect needs to come up with design and planning, similarly to build an enterprise/corporate website, a website architect comes up with the blueprint of the website. The architecture of the website not only include the UI/UX but it also includes all the applications, programming logics, interfaces, along with the programming language, coding standards, data storage, server requirements, performance, scalability & everything that would go into building a powerful, efficient & engaging website, eliminating all the assumptions to solidify the user interface, user experience, programming cycle & business goals. The architecture is usually divided in 3 different parts. Presentation Tier, Application Tier & Data Tier.

To fulfil client expectation you have to make website navigation easy, clean coding, functionally rich & engaging. Most importantly it should deliver the concept seamlessly to the end users. Before creating an architecture, it is important to know client’s organizational goals & business logic. This will help to stay focused on what matters and will drive decision making. The goal of the website will help define the features and functionalities that the website will include. It will also help to identify specific modules of the website to be developed. Hence the seamless architecture creation of the website will benefit. It is essential to conduct research to find out everything about your audience of the website including:

The application tier is for the business logic of the website. It is called the middle tier or a logic tier. This tier is pulled from the presentation tier. Once you have done your audience research, a good way to translate that information into a function-able format is through logical modules. Modular approach for any website architecture makes it easier on the developers and designers to engage into activities and build the website in smaller chunks keeping the overall business logic in mind. The divide and conquer rule applies over here, where the website, depending upon the features and functionalities required gets bifurcated into smaller modules. All in all, creating the modules of website is a great technique for increasing the productivity of development cycle.

The architecture will be a perfect one if everything becomes functional once you integrate all the modules together. The website architecture has to be precise in order to achieve the perfect result and hence it is of paramount importance that the website architect should be experienced with developing blueprints for enterprise websites and should have vision of the website.

Testing the website is a highly modular process and the enterprise websites can’t be tested in a single go. The modules that are created for such websites needs to be tested separately to evaluate the performance, I/O, code reviews & several other things before they are verified to be completed. Once done the integration needs to be tested and the QA team has to be deployed to ensure that the modules are working seamlessly with each other to create a cumulative result in favour of the overall objective of the website.

Before creating the web application, gather all the content and assure it is clear, current and consistent. The data tier ensures that it is separate from the presentation & application tier. The data tier houses content into the databases & ensures that it stores all the content independent from the business logic.

Website architecture is basically the blueprint that pulls everything together, it’s an establishment for making an extraordinary user experience. By taking the time and logic of website architecture, the website development team is guaranteed to offer the breathtaking output to the client and the website users, which in turn leads to a higher conversion rate and improved user experience & engagement.