Datasheet

For example, let’s say that we wanted to organize the books in a bookstore. To do so, we would first take
an inventory of all the books currently sitting on the store’s shelves, and figure out the best way to orga-
nize them. Should we sort the inventory by author, title, genre, or some combination of the three?
Should we put all paperback books on one shelf, with all of the hardcover titles on another? Other than
the funny looks we’re likely garnering from you, these questions are actually quite important. We could
settle on an arbitrary order for our books, but it’s more important to organize them in a way that will
enable us to find our books more easily in the future.
Furthermore, as you sift through books in the store, you’re sure to uncover a few that you could bear to
part with. Perhaps you’ve not read one book in years, or you realize that you don’t really need all eight
copies of Goodnight Moon. If you should come across some of these less-valued books, you can either part
with them to make your collection more lightweight, or relegate them to a lower shelf so that other
books might be featured more prominently. Similarly, any online content audit you perform will proba-
bly enable you to identify and remove cruft from your Web site, reducing the number of extraneous
pages your users will have to sift through to achieve their goals.
So, turning to WebMag 5000, let’s examine what we’ve already learned. In our early requirements-gather-
ing discussion, we’ve learned that articles, features, and tutorials are the meat of the site. In further dis-
cussions, and in clicking around the old site, we discover that there is a significant amount of other
information not accounted for:
❑ A contact page
❑ Rates and information for advertisers
❑ The site’s copyright information
❑ An accessibility statement (for users with special browsing needs)
❑ Profile pages for all of the articles’ authors
❑ Information and tips for prospective writers
❑ Pages on the site’s history and development
❑ A subscription page (which details various for-pay services into which readers might opt)
After creating this content inventory, we can evaluate the merits of each item with the site’s stakeholders.
Each piece of content should be thoroughly reviewed, and its relevance to the site considered carefully. Do
users really need to know about how the site was constructed? How many users currently convert from
non-paying readers to paid subscribers? Is the “subscribe” feature even worth maintaining?
Once we’ve determined which pieces of content are to be culled from WebMag 5000, we can sketch out a
diagram of the content inventoried thus far. It might look something like Figure 1-2.
Granted, this sketch is purely informational. It lets us quickly see all of the information contained in the
site. There’s no thought given to how this content is to be ordered, or to how a user might navigate from
one area of the site to another. But this is only the first step in our IA planning. Think of this inventory as
having taken all of the books off of the shelves. Now we must organize our pages in an intelligent fash-
ion, so that our users might be able to access them more easily.
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The Planning and Development of Your Site
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