Website navigation and page categorisation

[thing3b]

I am designing a new website and I am trying to work out the best way to order or categorise my pages. I am aware that tagging has taken off in the blogging world, but I am not sure that tagging can be applied to a 400+ page site of random things. The one thing I can say about my site is that most of the content is static.

If you are running a content site, be it articles, photos, games; Have you got any ideas on how I could group the pages on my site without having to assign categories, but still be able to offer users less dynamic navigation than a map of tags?

All navigation methods and methods to group text and non text items greatly accepted.

[Webwork]

I think you approach this in 2 ways.

First, you do your level best to organize and name things in a manner that reflects your experience or familiarity with the subject. Then, you visit other sites on the same topic and compare your categorization with theirs, asking "does their approach offer any advantage?" and merging the two structures to fashion the best of both/all worlds.

Once you've worked out the best version of your perception of how the world at large may be accustomed to viewing the presentation of the subject you can always add a search box that allows keyword search of the website's content.

There are proprietary solutions that you pay for, there are system solutions (such as Microsoft's indexing service, which I believe comes with either IIS or Win2K server O/S) or you could install Google's site search.

My read of tagging is that it's nice, but with large enough numbers, it adds to complexity instead of illuminating the elemental.

Keyword search might be an example of what I mean by "illuminate the element(al)".

At the end of the day you will have 1) your best shot at a logical structure; 2) a keyword search function; and, 3) tagging.

Hope that helps.

[thing3b]

So generally you are saying to have all the pages categorized, and offer searching and tagging as secondary navigation methods.

All my content is submitted by users, so what would be the simplest and most user friendly way to allow users to categorize things?
Should I only allow predefined tags or allow the user to define them all?