Forum Moderators: phranque
I am working in the web unit of the for the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies and I’m trying to figure out whether there isn’t a better way to organize our site from the user’s point of view than with a classical tree structure.
We are currently in the process of redoing the whole site which is the perfect opportunity to rethink how we organize our content. I am aware of the dangers of reinventing the wheel when there are well-established standards. But our problem is that we have a lot of content that is very broad and very deep and unfortunately the depth makes a lot of content quite inaccessible. And while we will be able to eliminate one or two levels from the navigation when we rebuild the site, it will always be a site with a lot of deep content.
So I’m wondering: Isn’t there a better way to make that content accessible to users then forcing them to follow branch after branch of a site tree? I am familiar with Tagclouds, the “Flamenco Search Interface Framework” (http://flamenco.berkeley.edu/) and Topical Maps like “The Brain” but that is pretty much all I have found so far.
The thing is, we are really looking for a tool/system to replace the navigation and not the search. If you know of any other clever ways to project a deep information structure onto a navigation then I’d be very happy if you could share these with me.
Thanks,
Timo
[edited by: jatar_k at 3:55 pm (utc) on Nov. 7, 2007]
[edit reason] removed url [/edit]
i've seen some interesting document selectors and sorters implemented as java applets.
(allowing more sophisticated browser interaction and decision processing than purely GET/POST mechanisms.)
What(event type), Where, and perhaps When.
This can be dressed up as navigation if desired eg click on map for "where", icon for "what" etc.
Would also look at web statistics, if most users don't come via home page, then don't base navigation around that.
Timo
