Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, Second Edition

Administration

You’ve finally launched your web site or redesigned the taxonomy for your corporate portal. In the early days of the Web, you’d now celebrate with a glass of champagne and then move on to another project. However, as web sites and intranets become increasingly mission-critical, more and more people are being dedicated to continuous improvement and administration of the site over time. This is a very good thing for usability. It’s impossible to get everything right the first time, and there’s no better way to learn what does and doesn’t work than to run user tests on a fully functional system.

The administration of an information architecture falls into two discrete categories. First, you have day-to-day maintenance, including tasks like selection and evaluation of new content, classification, indexing, and controlled vocabulary management. The amount of maintenance work is directly tied to the rate of content churn.

Second, you have periodic evaluation and improvement of the site. Remember all the research methods we covered in Chapter 10? Now is the time to apply all that good stuff to the continuous improvement of your web site.