Brainstorm on How To Organize Racketboy Archives

[racketboy]

I've been a student of web design for over a decade and have been reading books on information architecture and such, but its hard to apply textbook concepts easily to every situation -- and classic gaming is one of those unique topics.

So even though I have some ideas in my head, I'd love to hear your ideas on how I can redesign the front page and the sidebars/menus on the articles to help people (both rookies and veterans) dig through the older content that is relevant to their needs.

Ok, go!

[marurun]

I'm very glad to hear you're reading up on IA. IA is one of the components of the IAKM degree I'm getting (I'm actually getting two degrees, an MLIS and an MS in IAKM).

Now, you could consider tagging articles and using a tag cloud to retrieve them in addition to a traditional date-based system. Or you could come up with a very basic classification system. I do think the current setup isn't bad and is actually a decent start. It just seems to me it might need a little expansion and additional depth.

[elvis]

Now, you could consider tagging articles and using a tag cloud to retrieve them in addition to a traditional date-based system.

That was going to be my suggestion. Complex articles are difficult to organised by a single sort criteria. While broad headers are useful, sometimes you'd miss a good piece of information because it's buried within another article somewhere. Tags are a great way to overcome that.

[marurun]

Of course, a controlled tag vocabulary is often required to keep tag clouds useful.

[fastbilly1]

tag cloud, not only does it just sound cool, I find it the best way for me to find things - it brings me to an idea that I should be posting soon.