If you want your website navigation to reflect the way that users might find your content, you obviously want it to serve their use cases and the terminology they’re comfortable with. Ideally you’d do this by asking sample users to build your navigation for you, but in the absence of any willing volunteers one of the best things a site owner can do is card sorting.
It sounds pretty simple. Take the resources you want people to navigate around—so generally the furthermost leaves of your navigation tree: rich content pages, applications and the like rather than section indexes, which might contain navigational preconceptions—and try to assemble them into groups. Pretend they’re written on cards—or, in a more agile way, actually write them on cards and shuffle them round a table—and try to assemble piles of similar resources. Closed card sorting involves predefining the groups, and is ideal for arranging new elements in an existing navigation and a good compromise for building a new navigation quickly; open card sorting is the same, but with no predefined groups. The results are better but it takes longer.
Card sorting really helps site maintainers escape preconceptions and build a navigational hierarchy that makes sense. So although it seems like overkill, this is actually what I have just done for this website. As with much that I’m currently doing towards the site rebuild, it’s intended as a learning experience; a voyage of discovery, albeit taken on a Tonka truck within the safe confines of the wee sandbox that’s my personal site.
My first pass yielded around fifteen resources—rather fuzzily defined, but including varied things like “my blog” and “a link to my Twitter feed”—which I wanted people to be able to navigate around. I arranged these in a single-parent hierarchy beneath six main headings: ongoing, literature, coding, academia and portfolio. However, this felt a bit forced (and some sections, especially “academia”, are mostly opportunities for old documents to gather dust. I tried to imagine adding a more freeform vocabulary that cut across a lot of this, something like tagging, but there was something wrong.
Unsatisfied, I completely scrapped the single hierarchy and tried again. This time the list of resources had expanded to more like twenty, and I went for a more radical approach to grouping. Instead of trying to group objects as cards in a pile, so each card could only be in one pile, I tried to imagine from the start what groups plural they might fit into. Although I was still thinking in terms of menus, the parent terms were now more like categories from a taxonomy, with any menu item being available from several categories.
This resulted in seven terms:
tech, content, social, lit(erature), work, love and misc
This blog, for example, could fit under “tech”, “content” and maybe “work”, and would be accessible from all those places. My attempts at creative writing on Quiet little Lies could go under “content”, “literature” and possibly “love”.
As long as the number of objects didn’t get too long (and objects didn’t spread under too many terms) then these seven terms could still make sense to the user as a starting point, even if they found different things in multiple places. In fact, in the brave new world of folksonomies and tags, web users might be getting used to less hierarchical ways of navigating, so this might even pay off.
Drupal’s menu system supports multiple or mixed hierarchies out of the box, but I preferred instead to actually use categories, and tie these to a menu with the Taxonomy Menu module. I might not follow that route in future, as it essentially only supports linking to Drupal’s out-of-the-box category index pages, with content sorted in reverse date order, whereas I’l almost certainly want to do something nicer. But like card sorting itself it was a good springboard to getting things working and feeling happy with progress.
For now the hierarchy is implemented with dummy content, but I hope to fill it out more—and then expose the navigation—in the next few days. Right now it’s just nice to see things starting to come together. Also, having seven top-level terms fits in rather neatly with the design decisions I’ve already made: more on those later.
You know those days – stuck inside with grey weather and in a rut creatively, feeling that there’s nothing you can do.
I’m a photographer by hobby, and when such a day happens (like yesterday) one often wallows in it a bit.
There are lots of great posts out there on finding inspiration by a variety of means (especially breaking photographers block), but sometimes you are away from other people and or the internet, so what can you do?
Keep a notebook. Nothing fancy, just something dedicated for ideas of things to try kept nearby on your desk or close at hand. When you do have ideas, jot them down, so that when a grey day does happen and you are feeling uninspired, you have a list you can delve into. Something that can be applied to all creative outlets, whether you write, code, make music, art or photographs.
There are all sorts of online tools you can use in collating list of things and links (like delicious appropriately tagged or favoriting inspirational photos online showing techniques you wish to try).
But when it comes to regularly accessed lists, the simplicity of pen and paper can’t be beaten, and it’s great for recharging your inspiration now and again when it’s flagging.
I’ll just tell you – you probably already know anyway. I’m a lazy blogger. I don’t seem to have time to write as many articles as I’d like for slightlymore. I know what the problem is – I don’t write enough because I have this strange inability to put small or waffley articles on it – I’d rather that it stayed as a blog devoted to development and internet related things.
I present you with my diary of things which I intend to use as an outlet for the frustrated writer in me who wants to write short snippets about cool stuff. That’s not the aim of the site, however. The aim of the site is for me to write about ‘that interesting thing’ which I found. I am planning on writing something every day (wish me luck on that!) but because it’s really only a microblog I hope that it will happen. And I reckon that a happy side effect of all of this will be that in the end I find it easier to write here because I will have already expunged the crap from my head :)
I’m not really sure what content will be going on to the site – I don’t even know what will be going on it tomorrow until I find it. All I can tell you is that if you’re a little bit nerdy, like me, then a lot of the content should be quite interesting and relevant. Be sure to follow @diaryofthings on Twitter to see when something new has been posted.
Or subscribe to the RSS feed if that is more of your cup of tea.
Taken on a visit to Sissinghurst in Kent, at the weekend. Lens was a 17-40mm f4 shot at 1/400th at f/8.0 aperture with a focal length of 32 mm. I believe the clouds are of type Cumulus (low detached) Humilis (not tall) Radiatus (in rows due to wind).
It was around 9 or 10 in the evening in the Jam Factory. After a very successful Ox Tuttle, Ben Walker (@ihatemornings), Colin Mercer (@colinmercer) and myself came up with one of those genius drunken ideas. oxfordbloggers.com is it.
The aim is simple – to create a place to collect the thoughts and ramblings of Oxfordonians to give an idea of the general flavour of the local part of the blogosphere (man, I hate that word!)
The rules are also very simple. Live in Oxford? Have a blog? Want to be part of a relatively active nerd/geek/blogging community? Answer yes to those and you’re fully qualified to get your blog put on there too :) A rough outline/overviewy kind-of-thing reads something similar to this:
- We’re not going to put advertising on the site, or make money in any way.
- All content is fully attributed to the blog authors.
- All links go directly back to the original blogs.
- We’re not enabling comments – if you want to comment, go to the blog.
- We’re only doing this to get some more people to read blogs that we think deserve it.
Taken from the about page of oxfordbloggers.com
It’s still early days (less than 24 hours from conception to go-live) so excuse us if you manage to break something or you get a splinter from a badly sanded edge.
If you’ve been keeping up with the posts on slightlymore, you might have guessed that there was a new section appearing on the site. It has now been born, and is called light relief. It’s intended to be a place where I can put the every day bits and pieces which I find and would like to post for the rest of the world to see. I didn’t feel that the belonged on the website before, and it was quite disappointing and annoying.
So roll on down and have a look. As mentioned in the previous announcement – I’ve set up an RSS feed specifically for this section, so if you find that you like what’s on there, please subscribe to have the entrails of my mind appear in your feed reader.
I’m currently giving slightlymore a bit of a restructure and have decided to split up the feeds into more sensible chunks. I now offer four feeds for your pleasure:
- Everything – this includes posts by me, external links, frequently googled questions and a new light relief section. If you subscribed to my feed before 20th June 2009, this will be the one you are subscribed to. The only difference you’ll notice is the new light relief section.
- Just the blog posts – this pretty much does exactly what it says on the tin. It will provide only content which has been written by me.
- Just the links – this will give you the links off to other websites which I often post. This feed will be very useful for sparks if you’ve got Shaun Inman’s new RSS reader – Fever.
- Just the light relief – will provide you with only the content from the light relief section. This will include jokes, youtube clips, funny pictures and other entertaining thingies and wotsits.
This post is mainly aimed towards Wordpress, Textpattern and (probably) a multitude of other CMS driven website users. ‘Smart’ web software will automatically create a ’slug’ for your new article, but it’s not always best to trust the CMS to come up with the best URL for you.
Oh, by the way, a slug is a part of the URL which uniquely identifies a post in a CMS. For example, in the URL http://www.example.com/blog/my-new-post, the slug is my-new-post
The rant
Take my new FGQ – What does the -= operator do?. Auto-slug-generators will (mostly) create the slug what-does-the-operator-do – which I’m sure you’ll agree is not too useful. Firstly, it would be difficult from a user’s point of view to remember which characters to remove and add in to the URL, but secondly, from an SEO point of view, it’s not terribly descriptive. Thirdly, if I then wrote an article with the title what does the += operator do – wordpress would create a very similar slug.
The point
Most, if not all, CMS systems allow you to change the slug of the post or article. Most of them also automatically create one for you. I am making the point that the automatically created slug is not always the best. When you create a new post, take a moment to think about what you’re trying to say, how people might search for it, and optimise for both. For example, this post is called Don’t leave post slugs as the default, but I have decided that the best way to describe it SEO-wise is post-slug-optimisation. It’s a minor thing, but it can make all the difference between being on the first or second page on google.
