concepts

Information Architecture

admin1 - Fri, 2009-12-11 22:21

Information architecture for a site defines how the data and subsequent interfaces are related. The relationships have to do with how the data in your site is organized, stored, accessed, grouped, labeled, and related to other data within your site. Therefore IA considers your site structure, interfaces, content, and data.

When you look at a site from the audience’s perspective, you see IA reflected in how the

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Structure Analysis
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Perfect Requirements

admin1 - Sat, 2009-11-21 15:47

A traditional requirements process includes identifying, assessing, documenting, and validating the requirements. If validation fails, the processes repeat until enough clarification is obtained.

Requirements identification determines what the site should do, what tasks it should support, the types of information it should contain, and the types of interactions it should allow, to name a few. During assessment, you evaluate the requirements collected to ensure they are a clear, complete, and unambiguous description of what you need. Documentation can take many forms.

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Why do requirements matter?
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CMS Analogy

admin1 - Thu, 2009-11-05 16:03
What is a content management system? In simple terms, it is typically known as a website generated by data stored in a database. The idea is to store information in a database and serve it up as web pages. So, any system that stores your web page information in a database and presents that information in dynamically generate web pages can be called a CMS. But how do you know which CMS is right for you? One way to determine which CMS is right for you is to use an analogy. So let's us a transportation analogy.
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Conduct a Needs Analysis
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A System Perspective

admin1 - Wed, 2009-11-04 15:42
The word [tip:system=Systems are combinations of related components organized into a complex whole.], is often thought of as the technology that houses your website. For example, your content management system. When planning, building, maintaining, and sustaining a website, it useful to think of system as more than that. A system includes the technology (the CMS), processes, tasks, policies, data, tools, and users that make up a whole web system.
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Operations Overview
Big Planning Picture: Life-cycle
Production Overview
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Information Architecture

admin1 - Tue, 2009-11-03 15:35

Information architecture (IA) is an emerging practice being integrated into multiple disciplines so it is hard to find one definition that multiple disciplines share. Below are three definitions. What is consistent is the idea that IA is art and/or science and IA has to do with organizing information.

Information Architecture Institute defines IA as:

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Big Planning Picture: Life-cycle
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