Update Your Website - Revising Layouts for Content Heavy Sites

Last month's Los Angeles User Experience Meetup event regarding Taxonomy offered the Media Contour team an excellent opportunity to learn about and develop a better understanding of website taxonomy. Media Contour had the chance to conduct a pre-show interview with speakers Jessica DuVerneay and Alberta Soranzo.Jessica DuVerneay is an information architect at the Understanding Group. Alberta Soranzo is both the manager of user experience and strategy at the UCLA Center for Health Policy and Research and senior information architect at the RFK Center for Justice and Human Rights. They are both highly regarded in the fields of information architecture and user experience. Below are excerpts from the interview which cover the main ideas of their presentation.

Why Add Taxonomy to a Website

The first major topic of discussion focused on the core definition of taxonomy in the context of website design.

JESSICA DUVERNEAY: The first thing I want to say is that it's not something you just add to your project. It's not like if you get this service you should get this service too, and if you get wireframes, you might as well get functional specs. At least that’s the way that I look at it. It’s like, is it even a problem? For some clients it may not be a problem. If you're working in a really small property and your language is very clear, very domain specific or there's industry standards that are really easy to follow, not everybody needs a taxonomy. It is more for you know the thing that I'm seeing, why it's really relevant right now is because so many people are taking their old kind of main site and they are trying, they are realizing that the strategy of creating 15 micro-sites each time they have a new launch or a new iteration of a product. It has not been serving them well because they have confusing language. Something is called a shirt over here, it is called a blouse over here. You can't track SEO events. And really, I mean if you are going to look at it from a high level taxonomy, it just gives you an agreed upon structure that increases learnability and the findability of the your content on your website. That is the high level answer.

“Something is called a shirt over here, it is called a blouse over here. You can't track SEO events.” Jessica Duverneay

Practices of Taxonomy

The second major topic allowed for the team to distinguish between the traditional meaning of the word taxonomy and the meaning of how it is used for websites. Here we learn that taxonomy is inherent of its company culture.

ALBERTA SORANZO: I think it is tricky because we use the word 'taxonomy' which is a scientific word. And so if you look at taxonomies in science, you think of taxonomy as a categorization. That is generally how people understand it. In sciences the categorization of things is relatively simple because we construct families and you can easily place objects in one group rather than another. When we think of a taxonomy for a website, we deal with meaning and perception, which are highly subjective concepts. Which is why research—reviewing existing taxonomies, keyword research, user and vernacular research, is crucial to building a meaningful taxonomy. The goal, when building taxonomies, is to essentially identify and outline a consensus of meanings.

Taxonomy As a Service

The third significant topic discussed was how taxonomy is provided as a service. Understanding taxonomy as a step in the website design process supports the practice and reason for it in the first place.

JESSICA DUVERNEAY: We have had clients come to us and say we need a taxonomy. “When our team is writing an article they are using eight different words for the same thing in the article titles and it is really confusing to our consumers.” My consultancy never really try to sell taxonomy. Clients come to us with their problems and we say here are the activities that we can do to mitigate these issues. So somebody comes to us and they do not know what to label things. We have all these different things and they are called different things in different places. We are like, oh, it sounds like you might need some taxonomy work then it is our job to do the burden of proof -- here is why this is a problem and here is a case study where this has helped a client in the past.This pre-show interview was the perfect lead into this beginning / mid level practitioner-focused event. A case study was presented to provide an example of how to create and implement a successful taxonomy. A tool demo and peer to peer learning activity provided the chance for audience members to learn through application. The speakers and the audience members acted as one in the peer to peer learning group to help fully realize everything taxonomy has to offer for a website. Overall it was an excellent opportunity for the members of the Los Angeles Web Design Community to learn about taxonomy. Many thanks to Jessica DuVerneay and Alberta Soranzo and the The Los Angeles User Experience Meetup. A stream of the event can be found here: http://vimeo.com/66485666.http://vimeo.com/66485666

Throughout the Internet you can find all manner of articles and blogs dedicated to telling you exactly what you need to do to create the perfect website design for mobile devices. You’ll hear different opinions on content, context, and outright design features that are a must for your site to be successful on the mobile web. However, few of these articles and blogs address the mobile website design issues that could be holding your site back, like these.

Overwhelming text

People who are using the mobile web are often people who are on the go. They want to look information up quickly and with as little pain in the process as possible. Don’t make them scroll through a ton of information they don’t need in order to find what they’re looking for. Less, really is more, when it comes to mobile website design content.

Use of Pop Ups

Pop ups are annoying in the best of times, and downright loathsome in the worst. On mobile devices, they can be completely problematic. It’s best to disable them altogether on your mobile website design for the convenience of users if nothing else.

Burying Your Call to Action

Mobile screens are small. Keep your call to action above the fold (in the visible screen people see when they land on your site) or your conversion rates will suffer.

Not Having a Responsive Design

Different devices are different sizes. You need to have a mobile website design that accounts and adjusts according to these variations. Failing to do so renders your content unreadable to some, if not most, of your target audience.

[newslettersignup]

Links and Objects Too Close

Some fingers are fatter, flatter, or altogether less nimble than others when it comes to navigating around on their mobile devices. Placing links and objects too close together on the screen leads to a great deal of wasted bandwidth (a real problem now that so many characters have dropped their unlimited data options).

Buttons Too Small

Again the problem comes down to fingers. Not only do the buttons need to be large enough for the fingers to fit, but they also need to be spaced an appropriate distance apart so that fingers aren’t constantly tapping the button to the left or right of their intended targets.

Long, Complicated Forms

Mobile devices are portable, and are designed for people on the go. Often times people are in a hurry trying to get to the information they want in a timely, painless manner. Long, complicated forms make this impossible. Ask for as little information as possible from users if a form is absolutely necessary. If it isn’t necessary, save it for your desktop-friendly sites and skip it on the mobile websites.

Not Testing

Test, retest, and then test again. Test your site on multiple devices, multiple platforms, and in multiple conditions to ensure that your mobile website design is firing on all cylinders – not to mention providing a favorable experience for users on each of these mobile platforms.

These things are all small adjustments you can make in your mobile website design that will decrease user headaches and improve user experiences. Give them a try today and enjoy great improvements in response to your mobile sites.

There was once a time when updating a website – even doing a very minor update – required you to have a working knowledge of HTML. That time has long since passed. Today, website designers can provide you with ways to update your own site using a content management system that makes it just as easy as updating the newsfeed on your social media profile or updating your Twitter feed. Here's how it works.

Content Management Systems

Content management systems are backend features for websites that make it easy to add content to pages. They include well-known names such as WordPress, Drupal, Joomla and others. These content management systems give you an interface that is very similar to what you see when you update a social media feed.Using a content management system properly does require a few steps. For instance, before you add written content to your website, you'll want to write that content into a word processing program, so that you can do a spell check, proofread it and take all the other necessary editing steps before you actually put it online. There are simple proofreading features built into many content management systems, but it's still a good idea to use a word processor first.[newslettersignup]

Efficiency

A content management system also provides a great deal of efficiency. For example, with a good content management system, you can actually upload a great deal of content and have it posted on a schedule. This completely automates the process. This is a great way to cut down on the amount of work that people have to do to keep your website updated and, of course, it's also a great way to make certain that any vital information you need to have posted on your website on a particular day isn't overlooked.A good web designer can integrate content management into your website. This allows you to update your content whenever you need to without having to worry about ruining any of the code that underpins your site. It also allows you to spend your money with web designers on updates that are complicated and that require the services of a professional, rather than having to contract a web designer to do very minor updates on your site. Using these systems, it really is just as easy to update your website content as it is to add more information to your newsfeed, your social profile or any other social media feed.