Creating a new sites comes with many challenges. Part of our assignment for this week was to create three posts on our new WordPress. This is not too challenging — until you get to the next part which is creating categories and tags. Without much content, there is nothing to form these crucial information architecture elements that help with navigation and finding related content.
I pondered on how to create categories. I thought I was set on categories based on the type of content that the post discusses such as Reading, Lecture, Concepts, etc. However, as I started drafting my first post, I found myself mixing all of these in one post! According to this assigned reading, having a post fall under multiple categories means they might be too broad. If too much content is cross-listed, than the categories lose a lot of their meaning and usefulness as they will not be effect filters. I then settled on categories based on main topics in Information Architecture. These categories also might be ambiguous, however there are not as broad as my previous categories. Also this blog will be solely on topics within Information Architecture so it seems logical that it will be divided by its subcategories.
Main topics in Information Architecture can be debated and change over time which is a problem. In chapter 6 of the textbook, it is suggested that several categories should be made in a site’s hierarchy so that categories stay consistent since it is confusing to users and expensive to change them as they are prominent navigation. Thus it is recommended that a broad-and-shallow hierarchy is created rather than a narrow-and-deep one. This will allow content to be easily added without completely restructuring the site and its categories.
Once I made my decision on categories, I found tags to be much easier to wrap my head around. Several social media websites such as Twitter and Tumblr utilize tags in a very public and user generated way, or free-form tag which Thomas Vander Wal cleverly coined as “folksonomies.” So it felt like second nature filling out the tags for my first posts. I tried to find keywords in my posts as well as any overarching themes. These tags will appear at the end of my posts so that readers can click them to kind related content with the same tag.
Information Architecture 