I’m pleased to announce our first guest post, by Fran Alexander, taxonomist extraordinaire and writer of the excellent taxonomy and information architecture blog VocabControl. So please read on to discover why you really do need to care about IA.
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I’ve been thinking about information architecture a lot recently, in terms of how important it is for web sites (even simple web sites), what IA features a CMS can and should offer. Web design has gone through several major iterations over the last 15 years, each of these adding a new layer of sophistication, or, at least, as new aspect of endeavour, as technology, budgets and, most importantly, expectations, from both users and clients, increase. IA has always something that has sat at the fringe of most web design projects (moving closer to the centre the bigger the project, obviously), but it is my opinion that it could be something that takes a much more central rôle in the next big iteration of the web.
But I’m not planning on talking in detail about IA today (although I am planning a series of posts). Today, we’re talking tags.
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Well, it’s been a while since I’ve updated. No excuses, just the usual problem a lot of people seem to have with keeping up with regular blogging. I’ve been busy (our SEO business is really booming at the moment), but definitely not so busy that I couldn’t post. So mea culpa.
Anyway, I thought I’d kick the blogging off again with a quick update on Renaissance. I’ve not had a huge amount of time to work on it (for real this time!), but there has been some progress.
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This is another thing I’ve been scratching my head about a bit recently. Renaissance provides full support for multiple site administrators (as well as users on the front end). It has the usual basic infrastructure one needs to have things working smoothly:
There are also a few slightly more advanced tools (which I’ll go into in a second), but I’m really feeling a bit ignorant about what other packages provide (if anything) and a bit bereft of ideas for what I should be adding.
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I’ve always been highly independent. I’ve worked in an actual job for all of one week in my entire life (and that was work experience at school). I deliberately know next to nothing about standard coding conventions and I love to re-invent the wheel, just so it can be my own kind of wheel. And the only psychometric test I’ve ever taken said, quite resolutely, “Don’t even think about trying to manage this person.”
With that in mind, I’m always kind of shocked to think about how client driven Renaissance’s development has been. I started it because a client asked for a CMS driven web site, and a huge number of its features, from core processes right the way across to little tweaks came from client requirements (I hate to admit it, but most of the features I thought up for myself rarely get used in comparison).
In fact, clients were even the driving force for Renaissance’s true raison d’êtra, flexibility.
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My post about SEO last week got me thinking about just what a CMS ought to do for you, the web site manager or owner. With one of my many other hats on, I do a fair amount of business operations design, and I know that a decent system is what makes most business, large or small, sink or swim.
The same is true for the web today. Unless you’re putting together web sites purely for fun (which is probably a nobler endeavour than creating them for profit), there’s just a huge amount of management involved in running a successful, profitable web site (even just a small one!)
So, I got to thinking…
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After all the malarkey and general polemic of the web 4.0 thing, I figure it time to return to business as usual with this blog. In other words, plenty of dry talk about CMS design, PHP and all that stuff.
My subject for today is SEO and CMS design. Before I begin, however, a very quick ramble. This blog is ostensibly about my own CMS, Renaissance, but that subject by itself would end up being pretty dry pretty quickly. Although I do tend to bring posts back to Renaissance at some point (or start them off with it), I’m really trying to talk about CMS and web application development in general. So discussion and feedback around the general topic is always welcome!
Anyway, SEO…
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My previous post garnered a fair bit of attention and a reasonable amount of response in different channels. Quite a number of common themes and misunderstandings came up, so I thought I’d clarify and respond in one place.
So, first off…
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[If you like this post, you might also want to read my follow-up]
Not so long ago, I published a post on rich media, which was really an excuse to rant a bit about how dull, boring and generic the web is (okay, I think it was more than a rant—I did at least attempt to put forth a reasonable argument).
The post was inspired by how lacklustre people’s expectations are when it comes to technology, and at its end, I promised a Web 4.0 manifesto.
Well, here it is.
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An early design decision I made with Renaissance, when it moved from being a sloppy bunch of PHP files to a properly structured application (still in PHP) was to do with how the database is structured. I’ve pondered that decision a lot in the years since then, and have several times come close to going back on it and doing something entirely different.
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