I wanted to think out loud about the information architecture of the RC site. Probably not interesting to you, but a valuable exercise for me, and I don’t apologize.
It’s bad right now, for many reasons.
One is that since everything is in the left column and not well delineated, you get a nasty mess of links once you’re a couple levels down in the site. And that nasty mess exists on every page — it’s not pulled from a template.
But what really irks me are the large categories. I wasn’t a part of the initial design process, but it looks like some misguided notion of personas was pushed. But this isn’t a strict B2B site or intranet where all users have well-defined roles. Prospective students want to know what classes the RC offers and what groups exist, as do alumni, staff, and friends; but that information is, illogically, all under “current students”. And “about the rc” is found under “prospective students”. Arg.
I’m not in a position to completely rewrite those categories yet, but a stab in the right direction would probably look very traditional:
- about
- academics
- rc life (players, benz, )
- rc community (gallery, PALMA, SLIP, urban org)
- alumni
- calendar / news
But with cleverer nouns.
Even that raises problems; where does EQMC go, or internship listings?
Where to put the top-level navigation is even trickier. In the end, it’ll go up horizontally at the top. That seems inevitable. But then we’ll have another Cornell / UChicago / Community High. Boring! (but usable?)
Don’t get me started on the file structure — it’s flat, and everything’s in one folder. That’s actually a good thing, as we get ready to move to a platform that supports a large amount of open source software — there’ll be less fiddling to do. At the same time, it means that (with some grunt work) we can reorganize the navigation — without worrying about moving files into different folders, which would break links and cause a whole different set of problems.