Does anyone have any helpful Web sites or suggestions on good books that capture the state-of-the-art of Web site navigation? I’m working on a site with a demonstrably-unusable information architecture, but we can’t seem to agree on what we need to do to fix it.
Ghosted Notes
The writings of a technology ronin
here’s a real left-of-center idea….
the boss was presented with a problem of how to deal with a site that would store all the essential intranet info for all sorts of jobs
there was no point in trying to classify information into any sort of categories or heirachy – the variation of the jobs needing different data, coupled with permissions meant that one size fits all just wouldn’t work.
his solution? use social networking and modern web techniques. Throw away all the traditional classifications.
instead, use search to find stuff with bookmarking for referring to later. Google-like search with del.icio.us -like tagging. People can store their own bookmarks, share tags with others, be issued default starter ones. etc.
just a thought since you’re in a bind.
I’ve been using an open source cms [http://www.xoops.org/] for managing permissions, search and user data. It is not as elegant as some cms’s out there but the price is right.
barry.b – Cool ideas…. unfortunately this is for our main organizational Web site (http://ist.psu.edu). Everyone pretty much expects it to be an online brochure…. I don’t know if a real social networking approach would work for all of our audiences.
We’re currently experimenting with blogging as a means of status reports to cut down on the length (and tedium) of our staff meetings.
LinX – The cms is no problem…. we’re actually moving to Plone from an in-house custom CMS, so we’re trying to use this opportunity to fix the "I can’t find anything on your site!" complaint.