☕ SharePoint Tip #22 — Hub Sites and Information Architecture explained

Posted on by

Good morning! Here is your 15-minute SharePoint tip for today.

Day 22 | Week 4 — Product Owner Mastery

Hub Sites and Information Architecture

Information Architecture (IA) is how you organise SharePoint so content is easy to find. Hub Sites are the technical feature that makes IA scalable.

What is a Hub Site?

A Hub Site is a SharePoint site that acts as a parent for a group of related team and communication sites. It provides:

  • Shared navigation — a consistent top navigation bar across all associated sites
  • Shared branding — consistent logo, theme, and header across all sites in the hub
  • Aggregated search — when you search on the hub site, results come from ALL associated sites
  • News rollup — news posted on any associated site appears on the hub’s news web part

A typical hub site structure

Company Intranet Hub (root)
├── HR Hub
│   ├── Recruitment site
│   ├── Learning & Development site
│   └── HR Policies site
├── Finance Hub
│   ├── Accounts Payable site
│   └── Financial Reporting site
└── IT Hub
    ├── IT Support site
    └── IT Projects site

Users navigate through the hub to find content across departments — without needing to know which specific site a document lives on.

Information architecture principles

Flat is better than deep — avoid more than 3 levels of nesting. SharePoint is not a folder tree.

Organise by team/department, not by topic — "HR site" is better than "Policies site" (which department’s policies?).

Use metadata to cross-cut, not folders — if Finance and Legal both need contracts, use a metadata column "Department" rather than copying files into two folder locations.

Design for the 80% — your IA should serve the most common use cases immediately. Edge cases can navigate to the search bar.

Try it today (5 minutes)

Go to your SharePoint home page. Look at the top navigation. Does it reflect a clear IA? Or is it a random list of sites added over time? Sketch a hub site structure on paper for your organisation — just the top two levels. This is the starting point for an IA review conversation with your IT team.

As a Product Owner

Good IA is invisible — users find what they need without thinking about structure. Bad IA generates support tickets: "I can’t find the document." Every "I can’t find it" ticket is an IA failure. Review your navigation and hub structure every 6 months as the organisation evolves.

See you tomorrow at 6:00 AM with Tip #23 — SharePoint Pages and the Intranet!