Overview: Online Architecture
Probably the most common reason organisations contact me is to get help with their internal and external information architecture.
I usually find, however, that they first need to find a clear consensus on their communication strategy, content strategy and online strategy. Once that's done, I deliver a document which both you and your developers can understand, including some or all of the following:
- highly detailed sitemaps: internal intranets, external websites, knowledgebases, and the information flows between them
- mission statements for principal site chapters, features and content types
- business requirements for any revised or new features
- wireframes, allowing both you and your developers to envision how the result will look.
The aim is to deliver something detailed enough for professional developers and designers to give you a concrete quote, but not so technical that noone else understands what they're building.
I can then work with them to deliver it, or assemble a team and manage the site build for you.
Check out some of my firsts and best practices, or just get in touch.
More services: start with Communication strategy.
Relevant resources
www.poynter.org
A new generation of companies, like CIRCA, are redefining the structure of how information is treated, and building new CMS to support it. Their approach will inevitably feed into a new generation of CMS for whom the 'article' and 'page' are, if not meaningless, at least optional. And I for one can't wait. "what we’re really doing at Circa is a…
nymag.com
Damn, some of these ideas I implemented 12 years ago for the EC's thematic architecture. Nice to see them in a different context: First, the problem with current news journalism: "The column inches devoted to the new are column inches not given to the important... this stress on novelty is a holdover from when the cost of making and moving paper …
www.niemanlab.org
"we essentially write new content that we then throw away at the end of the day. Content shouldn’t die by design... topical contexualization... means guiding readers through large, convoluted news topics. ProPublica’s topic pages get us closer to contextualizing huge topics. For every major series that they cover over time, there’s a landing page…
www.niemanlab.org
The rapid evolution in newsmedia provides a lot of ideas for better content strategies in a less organisational, more networked society. One such concept is ideas-based, or fluid, beats for journalism: "... a way for reporters to be human-centric rather than newsroom- or bureaucracy-centric", according to the latest piece in Niemanlab's Journalis…
mathewlowry.myhub.ai
One of the reasons I created this Tumblr was to use it as a 'first draft’ of a Content Hub (see post), an idea which crystallised after reading Sloan’s original content strategy piece on Stock and Flow.The Hub is basically my way of saying that there’s more to life than the Stream. Unsurprisingly, Alexis Madrigal’s piece in the Atlantic caugh…
mathew.blogactiv.eu
Project manager and architect of a successful pilot to reorganise EUROPA along thematic lines, so people could figure out What the EC did, Why and How, in areas of interest to them, without studying its labyrinthine internal structure.