Web Information Architecture and Findability

Last week Keith Robinson published a great article on the concept of site maps and how best to serve users' needs. He questions the use of the home page and the inevitable arguments that follow amonst the stakeholders and information architects when trying to tie down what 'belongs' on it. He suggests a more freeform approach to organisation, with close attention paid to meta tagging to allow for better 'related content' grouping, which sounds just fine to me.

An interesting upshot of the article is Mike Davidson, Nick Finck and Thomas Baekdal's discussion of the 404-as-a-portal concept. I've had a go at this myself (although I got bored before finishing it off) but a recent project was completely based around it and when done properly I've been really impressed. I've got vague thoughts of recomposing content based on friendly urls but either way their discussion has showed me that I need to rethink my site architecture... I'm still using unfriendly querystring parameters, which is just plain lazy.

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