By Keith Schengili-Roberts
This book appears to be part of a new trend of titles (beginning with Jeffrey Veen's Hotwired Style, reviewed recently in TCP) that goes beyond the bare mechanics of HTML and into the processes behind creating professional Web sites. Information Architecture for the World Wide Web looks at such things as how to design and build a sound blueprint for a Web site before the Web master begins to lay the foundation for a Web site. If you are a professional Web master starting to build a Web site, or you want to make your existing Web site more manageable, this book should find a spot on your shelf.
Information Architecture for the World Wide Web
Both authors of Information Architecture are principles with Argus Associates, a firm specializing in designing information architecture for large, complex intranets and Web sites. They decided to write a book because they could not find any single effective source to help them with their job. The ideas in this book are drawn from several disciplines-including library and information science, human-computer interaction, and usability engineering-as they relate to creating an information infrastructure for Web sites.
So what is an effective "information infrastructure" for a Web site? According to the authors, it involves all parts of the design of a Web site, including the organization of Web pages that comprise the site, the navigation tools provided to users, labeling content effectively, configuring internal search engines on your site so users can find the information they are looking for and more. It also looks at the typical behind-the-scenes processes of building a Web site, and how to plan the structure of your site so that it can grow easily and is as simple as possible to manage.
The section on navigation systems provides a good overview of the types of navigation structures possible. It starts by reviewing the relative merits and disadvantages of hierarchical, global, local and ad hoc navigation systems in specific environments. It then gets more specific, looking at practical navigation elements you can incorporate into these structures, like navigation bars, frames, pull-down menus, tables of contents, sitemaps and indices. Each are described in detail and often with reference to examples on the Web that show these schemes off to their best use (the Argus site features prominently here).
The book is designed to help a Web master structure the Web site in a way that is meaningful to visitors and so that it can meet the demands of changes without having to be completely overhauled. There are many books on hypertext markup language (HTML) and Web design that look at the code level of things, and while they have their place it is nice to see a book that brings everything about the process of Web mastering together in a single book.
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