[theforum] revisiting categories

Erika ekm at seastorm.com
Mon Dec 22 13:40:10 CST 2008


Martin Burns wrote:
> 
> On 22 Dec 2008, at 18:26, Erika wrote:
> 
>>> I think subcategories would be a pain to maintain;
>>
>> why? how?
> 
> Because either they're comprehensive and therefore susceptible to 
> flavour of the month

re: TAGS/TAG CLOUDS

I am not sure how well tag clouds work for navigation and so would need 
more input on their usability to take an educated stance on whether they 
are  better than subcategories for things like "Code" which is simply 
too general for the amount of content we now have on our site.

re: FLAVOR OF THE MONTH

But so what is the issue w/ flavor of the month? Flavors don't go away, 
they just fluctuate in popularity. Java is still out there... heck, 
FORTRAN is still out there.

I'm sure we have bunches of evolt.org articles about Cold Fusion... but 
you can't tell, unless you do a search.  There are still tasty Cold 
Fusion jobs out there, lots of companies with legacy stuff that need 
Cold Fusion developers, even though it's no longer "flavor of the month."

re: ORGANIZING

In terms of organizing, the trick would be to have the appropriate level 
of specificity... "JavaScript Libraries" perhaps.. not jQuery.

Content Management Systems perhaps, under backend.  PHP perhaps, under 
code... but not Drupal.  I mean, I think the trick is to balance the 
appropriate specificity and organic (descriptive) view of our content.

As for News/Reviews, that stuff has been consistent and wouldn't change. 
   The consolidation is meant to reflect the deflation of importance 
(and content) to those categories we have experienced as the web has 
changed (and blogs have taken up some space that we used to fill).

re: USABILITY

> or they're not, in which case, why bother?

So our navigation MATTERS.  So that we can have a concise, descriptive, 
navigable list of links that makes sense to people who come to our site 
and are trying to find information that matters to them.

Instead of throwing up bunches of links here there and everywhere, let's 
put up fewer links, and put more thought into those links.

Let's think about our users first.

Erika





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