HTML & CSS: The Good Parts

Information Architecture and Web Usability

This book has proposed a few key ideas about web development:

• Hypertext links are the beginning, middle, and end of the Web.

• Web resources are fundamentally n-dimensional, not linear.

• The infinite number of ways in which content can be linked, cross-linked, subdivided, and combined brightly illuminates the value of effective wayfinding facilities on websites.

• Each website or application is actually a multilayered resource that can be made progressively richer.

• There is no One True Way to build a site, because requirements change according to business objectives and user environments.

The art of information architecture (IA) attempts to substantiate these ideas and meet the design challenges posed by them. The principal objective of its practice is to maximize the findability and usability of information; after all, what good is information if it can’t be found and used?

Note

This section is intended as an introduction, not an education. Those who desire more information about web information architecture should take advantage of the following resources:

• Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability, 2nd Edition, by Steve Krug (New Riders Press).

• Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, 3rd Edition, by Peter Morville and Louis Rosenfeld (O’Reilly).

• Boxes and Arrows, a site operated by and for Web User Experience (UX) practitioners at www.boxesandarrows.com.

• The American Society for Information Science and Technology, which ...