Dancing about Information Architecure
December 18, 2011 7:26 PM Subscribe
Best practice advice for overhauling the Information Architecture of a large website. For various reasons, we are looking to drastically overhaul the IA of a large (many 1000s of pages) site, to reflect a change in purpose. I'm interested in practical considerations and best practice ways to ensure the transition is as seamless as possible for users, search engines and wotnot.
For example, it would be lovely if we 301 redirected our important pages to pages on the new site to prevent linkrot - but that will create a huge, probably unmanageable list of redirects going forward, so we're looking for resources, tips and advice from others that might have faced such issues before that we can scour for general pitfall avoidance, and overall painfulnesslessness.
For example, it would be lovely if we 301 redirected our important pages to pages on the new site to prevent linkrot - but that will create a huge, probably unmanageable list of redirects going forward, so we're looking for resources, tips and advice from others that might have faced such issues before that we can scour for general pitfall avoidance, and overall painfulnesslessness.
I'm not seeing the maintenance pain of the redirects. Once you set them up, presumably using mod_rewrite, then they are established. You real risk is that you undergo a third wave of changes before inbound links have evolved to the new scheme. In that case you might use your web stats program to prioritize the ones that must be maintained.
posted by dgran at 9:08 AM on December 19, 2011
posted by dgran at 9:08 AM on December 19, 2011
IA changes so much from site to site that it's hard to speak in generalities (among a few other things, I do IA for a living).
I agree that user buy-in is important, and that users should be involved in every step of the process (not the least because, when there are disagreements over IA decisions, you'll need to be able to point to the evidence behind your reasoning).
I start every IA change with an open card sort, which I soon follow up with a closed card sort. I try to include at least 20 test subject for each test.
dgran pretty much covered my thoughts on page forwarding.
posted by coolguymichael at 10:12 AM on December 19, 2011 [1 favorite]
I agree that user buy-in is important, and that users should be involved in every step of the process (not the least because, when there are disagreements over IA decisions, you'll need to be able to point to the evidence behind your reasoning).
I start every IA change with an open card sort, which I soon follow up with a closed card sort. I try to include at least 20 test subject for each test.
dgran pretty much covered my thoughts on page forwarding.
posted by coolguymichael at 10:12 AM on December 19, 2011 [1 favorite]
Is governance an issue? When you have that many pages you often have multiple ways of managing content, usually for different stakeholders, some of which are probably not the "official" way. Any strategy for going forward should take content management, approval and sign off into account. This doesn't need to be baked into your CMS, but having formalized controls over this can prevent your revised IA from ballooning back outwards after your reorganization.
posted by dobie at 12:19 PM on December 19, 2011
posted by dobie at 12:19 PM on December 19, 2011
This thread is closed to new comments.
For redirects, you might be able to get a "good enough" solution by redirecting a section's sub-pages to the new section (like redirecting /widgets/green, /widgets/red, and /doohickies/ to the new section at /gadgets/) and making sure the new site's search feature is robust. Also look at your site's analytics to figure out what the top-visited pages are and make sure those pages redirect to something sensible. And maybe survey your users to find out what they have bookmarked, if you can.
Some useful stuff to consider: A List Apart on information architecture and user testing, The Page Paradigm, "Why wasn't I consulted?"
posted by dreamyshade at 11:03 PM on December 18, 2011 [1 favorite]