paper & pencil

The Importance of a Customer-Centric Design Approach

UIE's Christine Perfetti interviews Gerry McGovern on the importance of focusing on the customer.

The number one skill that every web team should have is the ability and desire to relentlessly focus on the needs of the customer. Web teams must enjoy being around the customer, they must be stimulated by thinking of the customer. You have those skills and everything else fits into place.

The number one skill of an editor is not the ability to write. There are many people who are technically good writers but their content is not engaging. The editor must know their reader/customer inside out. They must also have empathy for their reader—be able to think like them, feel like them.

Navigation Patterns

UIE describes The 8 Types of Navigation Pages they've seen during their years of studying users.

1. Content Pages
2. Galleries
3. Departments
4. Stores
5. Gallery-level Search Results
6. Department-level Search Results
7. Search Entry Page
8. Home Page ( Landing Pages)

ecm & eia

James Melzer created a diagram titled Enterprise Management in Context to help visualize the relationship between content management and information architecture.

(via Bloug)

the effect of content aggregators on navigation and page design

new digital web article Home Alone? How Content Aggregators Change Navigation and Control of Content

Despite our long hours and good intentions, content aggregators throw this site-centric idea out the window. They allow users to bypass a large portion of the design, whose sole purpose is to get them to target content. In this way the information architecture the designer envisioned may go unused, with users never clicking on the carefully crafted navigation links, never using the location-specific breadcrumbs, and in some cases never even seeing the much-fretted-over home page.

joshua porter prescribes the following in designing for content aggregators:

• Use web standards including the use of the id attribute to name sections of your content and allow others to link directly to those sections.
• Focus on the page level
• Design for different aggregator types - new strategies needed to have people link to your content
• Move toward user-driven aggregation systems such as faceted classification - articles by topic, articles by author, etc.

it's not a technology problem

Why Content Management Fails by Jeffrey Veen.

Content management is not a technology problem. If you’re having trouble managing the content on your Web site, it’s because you have an editorial process problem. Your public-facing Web site is a publication. Treat it like one.

absolutely.

unified content strategy

a comment to an earlier post on authoring & ia pointed me to The Rockley Group's Unified Content Strategy™.

their strategy is all encompassing in that before they audit and analyze a client's content they first conduct an organizational needs analysis. they also offer information and workflow modeling as well as develop an implementation strategy and provide mentoring services.

Ann Rockley has a book out on the topic - Managing Enterprise Content: A Unified Content Strategy

and the web site has a nice collection of articles and white papers

no roi on personalization efforts

cnet article on a new Jupiter research report, "Beyond the Personalization Myth," slams web personalization efforts.

Instead of implementing personalization strategies, the report suggests, companies should concentrate on the basics, such as making their sites easy to search and navigate.

"Given flexible, usable navigation and search, Web site visitors will be more satisfied with their experiences and will find fewer barriers to the profitable behavior sought by site operators," according to the report published Tuesday. "In fact, good navigation can replace personalization in most cases."

personalization efforts are costly and require large amounts of staff time to maintain.

Stymieing personalization campaigns is consumers' deep-seated suspicion of Web sites that try to extract information from them, the report found.

comments on interwoven

Rohn Jay Miller posts a breif review of Interwoven on the ia-cms yahoo group

I've just completed building a large-scale publishing system on top of Interwoven, which is considered one of the top CMSs and I keep shaking my head at the conceptual limitations of the system.

as Mike J points out, most of these CMS's are really
"page generators," which allow simple link management.
But Interwoven---just to pick on them--has no index
of the pages you've posted to a site. So unless you
keep a really good Excel spreadsheet record on your
own, you haven't a clue about the number, distribution
and content of the pages on your site.

We've looked at trying to paste Adobe Acrobat 6.0 or
website spidering shareware on top of the Interwoven
mess to have some kind of audit feature of what's on
the site---but why is this our problem?

I've seen home grown CMS's--including one I expanded
into a large-scale CMS at Knight Ridder
newspapers--and I've seen shareware and a few
commercial low-end SiteBuilder type applications. But
where is the leadership in CMS's for large-scale
corporate and institutional Websites?

I think a root of the problem is that all the venture
cash was burned up two years ago and companies like
Interwoven and Vingette are holding on by the
fingernails. (Interwoven stock has fallen from $65 a
share three years ago to $3 a share now---which means
it was a $7 billion company and now it's a $350
million company)

Just ranting, but perhaps there's a CMS that's
listening.

gerrymcgovern.com

Gerry McGovern's site has a lot of good info on the value of content.

opensource CMS

opensourceCMS

admin access to test over 40 open source php/mysql cms's. they refresh every hour.