Building great Intranet navigation



Get Web Design Tips and Tricks on mps-web-design.com. Building great Intranet navigation topic will increase your understanding on Web Design Tips and Tricks. We at mps-web-design.com only provide news, articles, information in Web Design Tips and Tricks. Web Design Tips and Tricks at mps-web-design.com provides the most up to date news and articles. If you have questions please do not hesitate to contact us.

While it may seem like a 'quick and easy' task, defining the navigation structure and organization of your intranet site will be one of the most challenging tasks you will face in the course of your project. Doing it well, is also one of the most critical success factors. The site structure, also referred to as the information architecture or taxonomy, is the foundation of your intranet. Creating an effective taxonomy is as much an art as it is a science. Use the wrong terms and your users won't be able to navigate by intuition. Make your site too deep and they will never find the content they're looking for.

One common myth is that if you integrate a search engine with your site you don’t need to focus as much on the taxonomy. This is completely false. All web users can be generalized into one of 2 buckets; 'browsers' or 'searchers'. Searchers, of course, will first use a search engine to locate content while browsers will manually look for the desired information by navigating the taxonomy. This is not to say that browsers never search, or vice versa, it merely suggests that all users have a preference for one method or the other when attempting to locate content. The most efficient site will have a well-organized taxonomy AS WELL AS a good search engine to satisfy both types of users.

Building your taxonomy

Creating a taxonomy on your own is arguably the best approach. After all, no one knows your organization’s culture and terminology better than you. If you’re short on professional taxonomists here are some tips to keep in mind when defining your taxonomy.

* The overall taxonomy should be wide, not deep
* Use primary terms rather than marketing oriented or slang terms (the goal is to use language that can be understood by a new employee on their first day of work)
* Try to keep some rigidity to the taxonomy, at least at the top levels -- this promotes familiarity for the users and enhances usability
* Build two taxonomies; the primary being functional-centric and the secondary being organization-centric underneath the functional-centric
* Try to limit your structure to just 2-7 items under each branch, otherwise consolidate
* Use real content to validate your taxonomy
* Define, validate, re-tool, define, validate, re-tool, and so on –- taxonomy development is an iterative process
* The structure should be very broad on top and narrow at the lowest levels

Remember that the taxonomy is a tool to locate content. The best way to verify you have a model that works is to use focus groups to test the structure. Ask the group where they would expect to find a specific example of content within the structure and see if that maps with what you’ve defined. If they keep missing, you need to go back and re-work the structure based on their feedback.




Shared Movies, 75% Each Sale. - Movie traffic, great seller, great conversion, Now with Google/Yahoo Tracking!
Witchcraft Exposed! - Powerful Spells about Love, Luck, Wealth, Money, Protection, etc. Guaranteed Results from the European Wizards. Great Affiliate.

Lets face it, when a visitor does arrive it only follows that we should do our best to help them see the value in our website, no?

Welcome new visitor, here is our feed, blah blah... Can't we do better then that?

I see a lot of variations on the Welcome new visitor, here is our feed type of thing when I arrive at blogs and such these days. Sometimes this gets customized if the site determines that I am a "Googler" (visiting from a search engine) and then offers me some piece of text to try and make me become a passionate user of their site.

This strategy never makes me a passionate user.

What does work is when I read the page in question and then navigate around the site and find more great content.

So the trick should be to make great-content discovery the goal.

Welcome Googler, let us help you out

Here we present one solution that works for helping people discover your site. As a side effect it will increase your pageviews in a proper, natural way. (We have a whole pile of other solutions for this, however that manuscript post isn't quite ready yet.)

  1. Check referer string
  2. If search engine, grab query text
  3. Do a full text search on your content to find other articles on your site that are related to their search query
  4. Pass the resulting list to the reader in a user friendly way
  5. Maybe keep that list persistent for the session, unless they close it

What we have done is created a custom, on-the-fly navigation system based on their search query! This little widget should work to keep them poking around your site.

Placement etc.

We've been using this on several sites now (along with some other ideas alluded to above) and it works. Pageviews per user go up. Bounce rate falls (more on that in the future too).

We have had to play with the placement of this box: top of the page? Floated to the right/left of the main page content? Following them down the page (with js)?

As they say, your mileage may vary, but chances are you will get more mileage out of more readers, and that is a good sticky thing.



Article Index: | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 | 32 | 33 | 34 | 35 | 36 | 37 | 38 | 39 | 40 | 41 | 42 | 43 | 44 | 45 | 46 | 47 | 48 | 49 | 50 | 51 | 52 | 53 | 54 | 55 | 56 | 57 | 58 | 59 | 60 | 61 | 62 | 63 | 64 | 65 | 66 | 67 | 68 | 69 | 70 | 71 | 72 | 73 | 74 | 75 | 76 | 77 | 78 | 79


More Articles:


1. User Experience - a new buzz word or the way forward for web development?
User experience might sound like just another bit of marketing candy, but there's a lot of science hiding behind this feel good phrase. People always come to a web site with a goal in mind, whether that's to book tickets, find out when the local recycle centre is open, check their bank statement or listen to the radio. It sounds remarkably simple, a logical assertion that the purpose of any web site is to fulfil the goals of the user. But time and time again, this fundamental concept is overlook…

2. Website Design: 10 Smart Tips To Improve Your Ad Copy By I-key Benney
Your website design may be affecting your sales in ways that you may not believe.Here are a few website design tips to help you improve your website and ad copy for greater profitability:1. You could decrease or increase the length of your ad copy. There is no rule on how long your ad copy should be unless space is a consideration. The ad should be long enough to sell your product.2. You could add some sub headlines on your ad copy. Sub headlines act just like headlines; they grab the reader…

3. Understanding Good Web Design Principles
We've all heard the line 'Don't judge a book by its cover'...but let's get real for a moment. In the real world everyone judges you (and your business) by the image you project. The same goes for your website. For many businesses, a website is the first point of contact for potential customers so it's vital that you make a good first impression. The three key components of any web design are: Presentation Functionality Usability Presentation refers to the way your website looks. Great website…

4. How Active is Inter-Active?
'Interactive,' like 'post-modern,' is an impressive word, thoughno one precisely knows what it means. This can be confusing--notto mention annoying-but the lack of a clear definition provides agood launching point for brainstorming.We'll leave 'post-modern' to the Derrida theorists. What doesinteractive mean, then? Let's break it down into components:'inter,' means through (a relationship is established between twoobjects) and 'active,' means it actually does something. Usingthis definition, a s…