Mjausson.com: Content Audit
I'm looking at the information architecture of my own site, mjausson.com. Below is a screenshot of the beginning of the content audit.
It looks pretty dire. There's a whole section that I haven't touched since 2002. The homepage does a very poor job of showing what the site actually contains. Even on the overview pages, the navigation isn't consistent.
Worst of all, if you're looking for anything in particular among the walks pages, you're basically screwed. The only readily accessible navigation is by date. If you're lucky you can find something using the search engine or a page-internal search for a place name on the Complete Walks page.
I'm thinking of trying some sort of facetted navigation. Geography would be an obvious facet. There's currently no way of seeing all walks from Buckinghamshire, to take one example. Chronography, should also be a facet. Not sure what else. It's tempting to adopt some sort of tagging scheme but I'm not sure how I'd do that technically without it requiring lots of manual intervention.
I'd love it if individual photos (regardless of size) could be the atoms but I don't think I'll be able to do that. It would just be too large a project. I'll have to stick with walks. But there should be a way of getting from one walk to other "nearby" walks in terms of geography or chronography.
The navigation once you're on a walks page also sucks. Getting to the larger version of an image means clicking on it and going to a page that shows just that. To go back, you have to use your browser's back button. I wonder if anybody actually does that. It seems unlikely. What I'd really like is something more like Flickr's slideshow functionality but with the little stories I tell about each photo. To me that's what makes Mjausson.com unique -- it's not just a bunch of photos but there are stories that go with the photos.
So the next step is to do a full content audit of the walks. There are in the region of 150 of them. About each walk I need to list the following attributes:
Once I know what I've got, I can devise a navigation for the site as a whole and for moving between walks and photos. But that's a much later consideration. Back to the Excel sheet for now.
It looks pretty dire. There's a whole section that I haven't touched since 2002. The homepage does a very poor job of showing what the site actually contains. Even on the overview pages, the navigation isn't consistent.
Worst of all, if you're looking for anything in particular among the walks pages, you're basically screwed. The only readily accessible navigation is by date. If you're lucky you can find something using the search engine or a page-internal search for a place name on the Complete Walks page.
I'm thinking of trying some sort of facetted navigation. Geography would be an obvious facet. There's currently no way of seeing all walks from Buckinghamshire, to take one example. Chronography, should also be a facet. Not sure what else. It's tempting to adopt some sort of tagging scheme but I'm not sure how I'd do that technically without it requiring lots of manual intervention.
I'd love it if individual photos (regardless of size) could be the atoms but I don't think I'll be able to do that. It would just be too large a project. I'll have to stick with walks. But there should be a way of getting from one walk to other "nearby" walks in terms of geography or chronography.
The navigation once you're on a walks page also sucks. Getting to the larger version of an image means clicking on it and going to a page that shows just that. To go back, you have to use your browser's back button. I wonder if anybody actually does that. It seems unlikely. What I'd really like is something more like Flickr's slideshow functionality but with the little stories I tell about each photo. To me that's what makes Mjausson.com unique -- it's not just a bunch of photos but there are stories that go with the photos.
So the next step is to do a full content audit of the walks. There are in the region of 150 of them. About each walk I need to list the following attributes:
- Date
- Page name
- URL
- Country
- County (optional)
- Starting Point
- Other place names mentioned (optional)
- Image formats
- Layout (traditional, masthead, masthead w/breadcrumb, non-templated)
- Panoramas
Once I know what I've got, I can devise a navigation for the site as a whole and for moving between walks and photos. But that's a much later consideration. Back to the Excel sheet for now.