Thinking about navigation
I was pointed to this article today entitled Thinking Differently About Site Mapping and Navigation. When I think about it, the philosophy behind the navigation structure over three years ago was very similar. Generally the home page is not a heiarchy of important content as it tries to be audience specific. We try to anticipate where people would like to go and what they might be interested in along the way. If all else fails they can search our keyword database or google.
Near the end of the article is a list of what you can do to address the users needs. What we do well?
- links within the content
- meta data in regards to page titles and relevant content
We do OK:
- related item grouping and linking – from the left navigation on the home page we do have this but it not something adopted UW-wide
Need to work on:
- a homepage that acts less like a landing page – the inherant nature of the UW home page design almost encourages the landing page ideal although I would say we have tried to fix that with the modernized template design in beta.
Not too sure about and needed to look up:
- folksonomies
- personalized tazonomies
- faceted classification and corresponding navigation
What a great article on site mapping and navigation. The last three things are new terms to me. Learn something new every day 
