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Can information architecture principles be easily put to good use when trying to help your readers find relevant content on your site? When your web site is so full of content that a simple search box won't do the trick anymore, what can you do to structure and make all of your content more easily accessible?
Photo credit: Ndul
By employing sound information architecture principles you can develop a content organization and navigation strategy that allows your readers to easily locate what they are looking for while having a rich and enjoyable user-experience.
For example visual site maps and visually grouped search results are much better approaches to help a user find what he is looking for than traditional linear text-based search engine result pages.
The information provided is exactly the same, but it's the way the information itself is presented, organized and connected to your navigation system which provides two very different user experiences.
And these type of challenges were the ones encountered by Stefano De Caro, Nicoletta Di Blas and Luigi Spagnolo a team of content and information architects, when asked to design an interface and content navigation system capable of handling a huge amount of data belonging to the Italian cultural heritage archives.
Following their successful work, the team decided to prepare an in-depth report where they explain and illustrate their fascinating research and content design journey. Their goal is to help more people understand how information architecture principles can be effectively utilized to structure the content of a web site and how these same principles can help you repurpose information in ways that make it more easily discoverable and visually-intriguing for your readers.
While Part 1 of this report dealt more with the theory and the challenges behind the design of a large cultural web site, Part 2 explains what are the actual steps you need to take to organize and present information in simple and engaging ways without overwhelming your final readers.
Here is Part 2 - Information Architecture: How To Help Users Find Relevant Content (Part 1)
Where can you find royalty free music As you probably know, it is illegal to use copyrighted commercial music when publishing video clips online. For example, YouTube has developed a copyright-protection system that immediately detects unlicensed uses of copyrighted music tracks inside videos published online and silences them or blocks them from public viewing. So, how can you get a nice background music to place on your videos without infringing...
How can you leverage information architecture to improve content findability and facilitate online content exploration on your web site? Making all the bits of your content you have published easily findable to your readers is not an easy task, especially when you have a large amount of content items that needs to be indexed and made searchable.
Photo credit: Ndul
A team of Italian information architects tried to address this exact problem...
What does it take for open business models to become an economy of the Commons? What are the pros and cons of a system based on peer production? How do open business models compare with the traditional economic system based on intellectual property and copyright?
Photo credit: GPRC, remixed by Robin Good
I have recently shot a small number of very interesting videos with Michel Bauwens, the peer-to-peer movement evangelist and founder...
Video encoding is the science of codifying the bits of data that make up a digital video recording into a unified whole according to a set of specific standards and parameters. If it sounds techy, it should. In simpler words, video encoding is the process of taking your original movie, as recorded by your camcorder, mobile phone or webcam, and preparing it for delivery in a digital format according to...
If you want to start selling a physical or digital product on the Internet, there are now a growing number of online services that make it very easy for you to create an online store in minutes. You, set the price, and these services take care of all the transaction and payment matters. In this MasterNewMedia guide, you will find the very best web services out there to build, create...
What has P2P to do with politics? Isn't peer-to-peer related to file sharing and pirated media? As a matter of fact, peer-to-peer is not just a popular set of tools and technologies to easily share and distribute digital content, but it is also a new fascinating study field that analyzes how we could approach our future by working and operating in a collaborative and sharing fashion rather than in a...
"How do I mobilize my website?" is probably a question you have already started asking. But after the initial curiosity, you have not found yet the time to think seriously about when and how you are going to convert your web site or blog into a mobile version that can be properly viewed on any iPhone, iPad or on any other modern smartphone. In this MasterNewMedia guide we have identified...
How can you help your readers find what they are looking for on your website? How can you facilitate their need to know what to click next or where to look when in search for something? Navigation instructions, or as someone calls them, interface design instructions for the user, are text-based and visual elements that can help your web visitors understand more easily what they need to click or where...
Did you know that if you already have a personal profile Facebook page and want to create another one for your company you can't? Businesses on Facebook are supposed to have a Fan Page, not a Personal Page! Yeah, and it is official: go check out the Facebook terms of service, and read carefully what they say: if you do create a personal profile for your business, Facebook will shut...
What is viral marketing? What are the characteristics of an effective viral marketing campaign? What does it take to produce content that flies on the wings of spontaneous word-of-mouth promotion? In this MasterNewMedia guide on viral marketing you can learn and understand the basic principles, foundations and strategies at the heart of effective online viral marketing.
Photo credit: Delion and Alberto Perez Veiga, mashed up by Robin Good
Viral marketing is a...
Colleges and universities in North America continue to increase their adoption and large scale use of social media technologies, outpacing both Fortune and Inc 500 on the blogging front. Besides using these to augment and extend their overall communication, learning and student support services, educational institutions have found a key use of social media inside their marketing and student recruiting strategies.
Photo credit: Clipart
This is the interesting result emerging...
Professional wireframing and web design prototyping tools take a step forward compared with free wireframing tools and commercial website prototyping tools, by allowing you to draw highly-realistic mockups of websites. In this MasterNewMedia guide you will find the best professional wireframing and website prototyping tools that you can use to create compelling visual web design projects.
Photo credit: Designer Break
Wireframe mockups have the unique advantage of providing an immediate visual output...
How slow is your website when accessed by a typical reader with an average Internet connection? Find out now: Check out Google Webmaster Tools, or go to Alexa.com and type your website URL, or do a test on GTMetrix and see where your page load times stand compared to your top competitors. If you are getting Ds and Fs on GTMetrix and if Alexa and GWT say your site is...
A nice, gorgeous-looking web site which has no design or navigation intelligence is a like handsome man with no brains. It may be nice to look at him but anyone would rapidly get bored with such a partner. Same thing happens on the web. While many strive to build super-good-looking web sites, only few really understand the strategic value of building highly navigable and easy to understand web sites. Why?...
Wireframing and website prototyping tools allow you to take full control of your website architecture without hiring a web designer. You can build a faithful draft of what your website layout will look like without detailing color, graphics and specific design elements. In this MasterNewMedia guide you will find the best wireframing and website prototyping tools under $150 to start sketching out your site right away.
Photo credit: Yasuhisa Hasegawa
A website...
How do go about improving or creating great website designs? Unless you have some references and key principles showing you how critical legibility, layout and content organization are, in determining your site look and feel, you are going to remain unsatisfied. Solving your typical web design challenge by searching for yet another cool new web site design template is not going to get you anywhere better than where you were...
Last updated - 20:35 Rome
Skype announced today that the latest beta version of Skype 5.0 would up the ante in terms of group video chat, as well as introduce a more stable and sleeker experience for its Windows users.
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OAuth is an emerging authentication standard that is being adopted by a growing number of social networking services. It defines a key exchange mechanism that allows users to grant a third-party application access to their account without having to ...
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I’ve heard of SNAPP before – "software tool that allows users to visualize the network of interactions resulting from discussion forum posts and replies" – but decided to play around with it today. This is a good example of a fairly simple, ...
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BuzzFeed, which tracks online topics that have gone viral, is offering a version of the analytical dashboard it uses to monitor the spread of Internet "memes" to any website, brand or publisher that wants to track the popularity of their ...
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Now that you have your paid search account up, running, and are able to pull basic reports, it’s time to start setting up your schedule for handling all of the various tasks required to truly steward a successful SEM program.
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Part of the new iTunes 10 software, announced and launched yesterday, is a significant new social networking feature for iTunes called Ping. It allows you to comment on music, 'like' it a la Facebook, or rate it. Ping is also very similar to ...
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We want more attention and traffic. If your business depends on volume, this is especially important (for instance, if you’re using ads). Getting traffic is a tricky business, and it requires a lot of experimentation. I’ll tell you what’s worked for me, ...
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Land, labor, and capital are no longer effective proxies for human productivity, creativity and intellect - end of story. We need to stop talking about social media as if monetization is some kind of mystery.
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The uncertain economy does pose complex challenges for retailers’ holiday season preparations. How they manage inventory will be a critical success factor, so smart retailers are working more closely with supply-channel partners to deal with different ...
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One of the most interesting new projects aimed at giving designers and developers a starting template for integrating HTML5 and other modern features into their sites is HTML5 Boilerplate.
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People are increasingly sharing different types of information on Twitter. For example, Tweets point to web pages, photos, videos, hashtags, people, check-ins, and more. Exploring Tweets is a great way to discover new and interesting information.
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Females are known for being communicators, and their social media usage is legendary among marketers, many of whom focus on targeting women on social sites. But men also care about staying in touch, and do so in much the same way.
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Intercall put out a press release today summarizing results from a survey of college students about watching webcast courses. I have to admit I was surprised by how widespread some of the behavior characteristics are… I knew that streaming courses over ...
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The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is diving deeper into Google and Verizon’s proposed net neutrality framework with a public notice and inquiry into two of net neutrality’s key issues.
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Today we are glad to release iCandies Icon Set, a set with 60 high quality icons in 64×64px, 48×48px and 32×32px, available in .EPS, .AI and .PNG. The set is designed by the talented folks from IconEden on a sole purpose of giving your projects a sleek ...
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After extracting a deal from Research In Motion that appears to give state authorities the ability to monitor messages sent over the company's BlackBerry network, India has said it may go after both Google and Skype in an attempt to get similar kinds ...
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In celebrating the merits of free software and the excitement over this radical networked production method, an important truth is left unspoken. Networked collaboration shines in the low levels of network protocols, server software and memory allocation, ...
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FaceTime represents a huge opportunity for Apple to finally democratize the video conversation like we’ve all seen in countless science fiction films. The keys will be ubiquity and simplicity.
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In addition to writing for their human readers, web writers and bloggers have to consider the digital web crawlers employed by search engines like Google. Your business can’t skip the task.
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You don’t need to be a big-time blogger to need to outsource some aspect of your blog. A beginning blogger with a serious business plan might want to contract a designer to create a skin for their blog. A entrepreneurial blogger might want to outsource ...
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