Internet Librarian 2010, day 1, part 2

Information Architecture and Navigation

Jenny Emanuel, of UIUC, talked about ways to improve your web site:

Home pages:

• Identify the site, establish the brand
• Set tone and personality
• Allow people to do something right away
• Reflect the personality of the library

Pathway pages:

• Gateways to secondary content
• Great for categories of stuff you can’t put on the homepage
• An additional way to navigate

Finding stuff:

• 5 ways of finding anything (3 of them can be a search box, a site map or index, and pathway pages)
• But ease of finding is better than multiple ways

URLs:

• They’ve lost their purpose
• Can be used as breadcrumbs
• Length and organization: no more than 2 slashes
• Index pages (index.html)
• Lowercase letters
• Naming conventions

Folders:

• Lower case names
• Less than 10 letters
• Broad topic areas that fit with navigation (such as Basic info., Library content, and Guides, how-tos)
• Index pages can be your pathfinder pages

Scrolling:

• Don’t scroll on a homepage or pathway pages
• Other pages OK, but be reasonable

Writing:

• Readers read in an F-pattern
• Break up text, use bullet points
• Use active voice
• Don’t rehash content on lots of different pages

Page creep:

• Don’t allow similar pages
• Each page has a purpose
• Each page has a home (in the navigation structure)

Tutorials, guides, etc.:

• Pick one name or define differences

Accessibility:

• Each page should have a title in the title tags
• Meaningful link text (not “click here”)
• Image descriptions in the IMG tag
• Bullet lists for lists
• Tables only for tabular content

More later.