Datasheet
❑ Prospective writers. Of course, since we’re looking for more volunteers to round out our queue
of authors, we should have information for them on how to contribute, and what we’re looking
for. These people will (ideally) be drawn from our regular readership, and they should already
be familiar with the topics we discuss.
From this, we can start to flesh out our site’s hierarchy. To address the needs of these three groups of
users, the highest level of our site might look like Figure 1-3.
Figure 1-3: Identifying the main areas of our site
Because our primary audience is our readership, a section entitled Learn will house all of the articles, tuto-
rials, reviews, and featured content for our webzine. The other main content area is the Contribute branch,
which we hope will pique readers’ interest in writing for our site and, therefore, increase our library of
high-caliber articles. And finally, the About section contains information . . . well, about our little site that
all three groups of users might need. Regular readers will get a better sense of our site’s aims and philoso-
phies. Writers will get a sense of how our site can give their work more exposure. Prospective writers can
use this information to decide if our site would make a good home for their work.
There are very few “correct” answers in IA. The approach we’ve taken here to organizing our hypotheti-
cal site could easily be replaced with a number of alternatives. For example, we could have easily placed
the site’s reviews, articles, and tutorials in their own top-level sections. Whatever structure you settle
upon for your own site, it’s important to gather feedback from your users whenever possible. There is
always the chance that assumptions you make about your users’ behavior — no matter how well
researched — might not meet with real-world user approval. If your project plan allows it, allotting
some time for user testing and feedback can only help improve the result.
Of course, the structuring effort doesn’t end with these three branches. As we said earlier, each level of
our site represents a higher, more fine-grained level of detail. Each of these three sections can contain
pages, that’s true — but they could also contain subsections, which in turn could contain pages and other
subsections, and so on, as shown in Figure 1-4.
Figure 1-4: Our content hierarchy begins to fill out.
Learn
Contribute
Home
About
Learn Contribute
Home
About
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The Planning and Development of Your Site
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