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a Collaborative Web Project |
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Design
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Site design
1. Information design
 "The beginning of all understanding is classification." Sir Hayden White
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You've brainstormed a number of great ideas and edited them down to a workable number, but how do you organize them in such a way that other people can find what they're looking for in your Web project?
Remember you're building an educational Web site and one of the goals is to help guide people to your information.
The first step is to take all of your ideas and start looking for patterns. Say that your team has gone through several brainstorming sessions and has compiled a list of ideas or specific pieces of information that they want to include on their Web project.
List of Ideas |
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| apple | yellow | hip hop | dog |
| red | basketball | brown | kiwi |
| monkey | jazz | peach | pop |
| baseball | chicken | swimming | black |
| banana | green | elephant | cat |
| blue | watermelon | purple | rugby |
Lumped together like this, these ideas don't make much sense. But, if you look closely you'll recognize patterns and logical relationships. These ideas can be broken down into more manageable groups, such as fruits, colors, animals, sports, and musical styles.
List of Ideas |
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| Fruits | Colors | Sports | Animals | Musical Styles |
| apple | red | baseball | monkey | jazz |
| banana | blue | basketball | chicken | hip hop |
| watermelon | yellow | swimming | elephant | pop |
| peach | green | rugby | dog | |
| kiwi | brown | cat | ||
| purple | ||||
| black | ||||
If you look at most Web sites, you'll see that content is grouped logically. The main page will have a menu or navigation buttons which take you deeper into each of these subject headings. By mapping information, you're not only making sense of that information, you're also determining the framework for your entire site.
Tip: The preceding example is a very simplified version of a team's idea list. In real life, information groups are usually not this clearly defined. You'll find that a number of your ideas or pieces of information might fit reasonably in a number of categories, such as "peach" which is both a fruit and a color.
At this time, your team will need to agree where information should be organized. The important thing to do is try to put yourself in the shoes of your intended audience. How do you think they will see the information?
After you've defined the relationships between information, you'll want to organize these groups into a visual representation, or a site structure, of your Web project.
page 1: Information design
page 2: Site structure
page 3: Site navigation
