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
medium.com
"We are currently witnessing a re-architecture of the web, away from pages and destinations, towards completely personalised experiences built on an aggregation of many individual pieces of content ... the result of the rise of mobile technologies... from many pages of content linked together, towards individual pieces of content aggregated togeth…
om.co
"An image is the gateway to your emotional memory... And on the visual web an image is the gateway to accessing almost all content and information... we are adapting to a different kind of a web, one that will be increasingly visual... [but] the only available methods to surface and categorize photos are beyond basic; we need something intuitive…
gigaom.com
How much more could Google News be? See "... a presentation that a German designer came up with that involved a wholesale redesign and re-thinking of what Google News is and does." Lots of good stuff here. Particularly like how 'smart personalisation' is used to help penetrate the filter bubble: "automatically suggest related stories on a news t…
blog.apps.npr.org
Good insights on combining editorial, programming and visual experts from NPR: "The multimedia crew wanted to make pictures and video that were truly web-native, which required web makers. And our news apps lacked empathy — something we’re so great at on the radio. It’s hard to make people care with a chart. Pictures were the obvious missing piec…