Robert Denton

Search Engine Optimisation and Accessibility

plasticbag.org | weblog | Using Wikis for content management… Now one of the problems with using Wikis generally is that they don’t lend themselves to the creation of clear sectionalised navigation. Nor do they do naturally find it easy to use graphic design, colour or layout differently on separate pages to communicate either your context […]

Navigation Study on Current University Websites Ken Kelleher prepared a useful overview of IA challenges on University web sites. Our main points he describes: – varied audiences – site architecture (taxonomy) vs. faceted view (audience gateways) He also lists a lot of the references I have in my bookmarks. This is a paper I have […]

Brown has an interesting entry point into their course web site pages. Essentially turns browsing course web pages into an application for viewing the data in different ways. You can filter based on department and semester. Very easy to do (given the right background architecture and likely increases the usability a lot.

Just wanted to note this. We vetted the reasons why we can’t use a horizontal menu bar at the secondary, or departmental level navigation. Anyway, I was looking at this essay seven resolutions for 2004 and noticed how nice their navigation is… wishing we could somehow build and/or enforce a stricter sense of IA on […]

Is Navigation Useful? First bullet point: “users comment on the content first; if the content is not relevant, then they don’t care about any other aspect of the design” Link this to the discussion of the “page paradigm” and the recent mention of a survey (user testing?) done with location of search input fields vs. […]

Summary: Recent studies have shown that while the use of breadcrumb trails to navigate a website can be helpful, few users choose to utilize this method of navigation. This study investigates the effects of “mere exposure” and training on breadcrumb usage. Findings indicate that brief training on the benefits of breadcrumb usage resulted in more […]

Good Experience – The Page Paradigm Like another thought about bread crumbs wherein it is posited that people who use them tend to be the regular users of the site and not the visitors who are there just looking for something. Another thing I noticed and emphasized in a page design (currently re-worked by someone […]

AT&T Feed Room — Love the enormous grid and columns representing a topic area. This is sort of gutsy but maybe a feed room is meant to be just this straight forward. It works. But gosh RealPlayer is a stinky thing. Rueturs has the same layout. And their site works with Safari better.

Metadata? Thesauri? Taxonomies? Topic Maps! Great resource for keeping it real.