Hierarchy as a form of content organization is dying. A major milestone — I want to say tombstone — in its demise is the shutdown of the Yahoo directory, which will occur at the end of the year according to an article in Ars Technica, Yahoo killing off Yahoo after 20 years of hierarchical organization. (Actually it… Read More »
The most important thing you can do to organize your Web content so that people can find it is to make it sticky. Making it sticky is more important than categorizing it or placing it in a hierarchy or taxonomy. It is even more important than linking your content set effectively. In fact, if you… Read More »
In my last post I argued that navigation based on classification schemes does not work because readers don’t classify their experiences. But while that is generally true, it is important to note that sometimes readers do classify their experiences, and that when they do, it is important that we base our navigation on those classifications.
In Web Organization is not Like Book Organization, I said that the TOC does not work at a large scale. It is worth talking a little more about why it doesn’t work, because it has important consequences for many of the navigational schemes that people propose for the Web and other large information systems. The reason… Read More »
One of the most difficult aspects of moving content to the Web is that webs are not organized like other things — books in particular. And the difference is not small. It is not that web organization is somewhat different from book organization. It is so different that you can’t even look at web organization… Read More »
One of the defining characteristics of an Every Page is Page One topic is that it has no sequential or hierarchical relationship to other topics. There are no previous, next, or parent links in an EPPO topic, though there may be many links to topics on related subjects. One of the objections I often hear… Read More »
I’m a fan of emerging technology, and generally tolerant of emerging terminology, but when it comes to job titles I tend to the view that if it was not mentioned in the Domesday Book, it isn’t a real job. I have, on diverse occasions, decried attempts to replace the title “technical writer” with something else,… Read More »
Findability continues to be the bete noire of technical communication. This may be a parallax error, but it seems that findability is more of a problem in technical communication than in other fields. The reason, I suspect, is that many technical documentation suites are too big to browse but too small to search. I have… Read More »
I was astonished at Sarah Maddox’s statement, in her guest post Why don’t technical writers use wikis — or do they? on I’d Rather be Writing, that wikis are not good at topic-based writing. Huh? Wikis are all about topic-based writing. In fact, it is the only type of writing they really support. What’s wrong here?… Read More »
The classical structure of a website is that of a tree. The trunk is the homepage. From there you climb the tree, upward and outward until finally you reach the leaves. That is how we design websites. That is how we test websites. It’s just not how we use websites.