Followers may have noticed the changes happening to my website. I'm in the process of recasting the website to better reflect who I am, what I'm about and where I'm going. This, turns out, will be a large undertaking.
Here is what is involved in recasting a site without losing permalinks, comments, blog entries and articles. The steps are:
- Recast your site ontology and taxonomy. These terms are misused and thrown about to sound authoritatively but it just boils down to how you are going to classify and orgnize the information on your site. For me, the natural ontology is Business, Government, Miscellany, Music, Technology and my Biography. Within each domain is a taxonomy to classify the content. There is a lot of work out there on the semantic Web so I won't discuss that here.
- Recast the site design based on the ontology and taxonomy. Design takes on many forms on the Web. For me, form has always followed function. Taking my cues from Jakob Nielsen's Usability, the first thing to tackle is navigation. Generally, primary navigation should be along the top along with secondary navigation (if needed), with tertiary navigation at the bottom and contextual navigation on the left or right depending on your culture's language. Then you add in all the various ways to view your content, aggregate your content, etc. Lastly, add in the ways your audience will interact with the content.
- Recast the look and feel. Notice I have separated the design and the look and feel? Most graphic design artists flip these steps. The result is that you end up with a beautiful site that requires a lot of maintenance and typically, but not always, cannot be extended or the content is difficult to repurpose. Much has been written about making a site stand out from a look and feel purpose but not having accessible content. The site that masters both is one that captures the greatest amount of stickiness.
- Perform the onerous task of re-aligning the existing content to the taxonomy. This becomes really difficult if you have years of content and have been "free-tagging" along the way. I've got it pretty good as I originally set up the site using The Thomas Jefferson Library classification system. Where things went awry is when I started pulling in my Del.icio.us social bookmarks using a site plug-in. The del.icio.us plug-in classified all of my bookmarks under one taxonomy term. Now I have to pick through the hundreds of bookmarks, add back the link to the site and re-classify it. I'll get around to it... eventually... slowly... some day... maybe.
So there you have it. I've completed step one and most of step two. I still have to do step three and will always be doing step four.
The biggest lesson learned for me is that you should think about the permanence of information posted to the Internet. Also, if you are going to integrate Flash into your site, consider your audience. The current trend is moving towards mobile devices and netbooks. Flash doesn't work so well there and content is king. Test, test and re-test your site across many different platforms. Use cross-platform standards for the presentation of your content. (e.g. Don't create your content using proprietary markups that only work for one [Microsoft] browser.)
I still have many of the views to create/edit. There are still a lot of broken links to old content and external sources. The current look and feel is warm but hidious. Navigation is good but a little cluttered.
Comments are welcome.
