Internet and Technology | Computers and Technology | * Written by Nick Ridout | Friday, 02 November 2012 05:05 | Word Count: 1307
General planning recommendations
It is useful to divide information analysis for Website planning into the following stages:
Survey existing content and Web site structure. Your current Internet or intranet site webdesign reflects its current information architecture. Analyze and record how information and content are distributed across your current websites and sub sites. Look at logs or other analysis tools to see what content is most frequently accessed and least frequently accessed.
Survey user requirements. Survey the current website users and intended website users, and record the kinds of information that they create or use. What information do they need in their daily work? Are they able to find that information easily? Does the current website structure an webdesign help them understand the relationships among the different kinds of information that the website contains? Is there missing information? Note any problems the users have in finding or using information with the website's current architecture.
Survey business requirements. Survey the managers
of the organization that the Website is being designed for. What are the needs of the website? Should the units or divisions be reflected in the information architecture (the webdesign) of the site? How will information be shared across units, or will it be isolated within one unit? If the site is targeted at customers, what information should they first encounter? How will they explore information about products or services? Use your analysis to create a detailed outline of your organization's content needs.
Plan the structure of your site
Your information architecture will determine the structure of your Internet or intranet site. By dividing the information architecture into processes, projects, or large content groupings, and by using those divisions to sketch out a hierarchy of sites and content within each website, you can plan where information belongs within that hierarchy.
Plan for social computing and collaboration
The social computing and collaboration features must be built upon a da
tabase of properties that integrates information about people from many kinds of applications and directory services. Your information architecture research should include information about users.
By collecting user information, you can create unified and consistent user profiles across the organization. This will help you plan websites that provide a rich set of social networking and collaboration features that are personalized for each user. Self-service site creation enables users to create their own Sites. As you plan for collaboration features, consider whether you should enable self-service site creation. Which users should have permission to create sites? Will there be a specific Web application where the Sites are created? What kind of quotas are needed? The people-related concepts that are recorded with your information architecture will also help you determine how to create a group of site users based on the processes they participate in, the distribution lists and social networks they belong to, the content they are likely to create or view, or the organizational structure in which they work.
Plan for managed metadata
Managed metadata is a hierarchical collection of centrally managed terms that you can define and then use as attributes. As you plan your information architecture, consider the term sets that are needed to help categorize items such as custom columns that are associated with documents and lists, or "Choice" or "Lookup" columns in an existing database. You can use metadata navigation to improve list view navigation. Metadata navigation expands the capabilities of list views and combines it with a Key Filters control, which makes it easier for users to find content by filtering a view of documents to a subset based on one or more navigation filters. As you plan your information architecture, consider how users will likely use the site hierarchy to navigate document libraries, in addition to the filters that users will use to further filter data displayed in library list views.
Plan for business intelligence and business data
You can present data in the context of your site structure so that it is available to those audiences that need it. For example, on an enterprise's intranet site, employee payroll data ? which must be available across the enterprise's divisional boundaries ? could be presented on the enterprise's central website so employees could see their own data.
Data that is used by a limited audience could be presented in the sites that are u
sed by that particular audience. For example, a customer support team could view and interact with customer support incidents in a site that is used only by that team, and a sales team could view customer data in a site that is dedicated to managing customer relationships. As another example, an enterprise?s technical support team could use business intelligence features to view metrics on technical support tickets, such as how many tickets are assigned per support technician, how many are open or resolved, and what the satisfaction level of the customers is.
As you plan your information architecture, determine what intelligence tools your enterprise needs and where the data in your existing applications should be exposed in your enterprise's Internet and intranet sites to be available to users who need it.
Plan for search
As you plan your information architecture, in an information architecture survey, keep track of concepts, search terms, and properties that your website's users will use when they search for information on your website. You will want this data when you are creating the search schema for the website.
Remember that users might search for content by using broad conceptual terms to describe what they need. Your information architecture survey will be useful as a tool to help map users' terminology and concepts to the underlying information that they are looking for.
Nick Ridout has been in the IT Industry for years, starting back in the IBM days, as a main frame guy. He has worked for UNIDATA as well, it was only later using his qualifications he started lecturing IT and Web Design, and was hooked. He started a web design studio and after two years sold it and then went to the UK. But you can't put an ex surfer boy in the centre of cold grey London. Back in South Africa he started All about Web Design, which has grown beyond expectations, the friends he made in London now work for him as contractors. The offices (packed with equipment) are in the centre of Somerset West, Nick stays in Gordons Bay, 500 metres from the sea.
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