I’m Bad at Information Architecture and I Don’t Know What To Do About It
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One reason I’ve struggled to write is that I don’t know how to categorize information. Doing so would not only makes it easy for me to organize, it will help readers navigate this site. Organizing the site factors in:
- what sections should this site have
- what metadata to include with each post
- how to evolve the structure as I understand organization better
and so on.
There’s two particular places where this is a big issue, media and links.
As a way to write more, I write notes on links from around the web. Should they be in a separate section? How do I attribute a link source, particularly on a user generated content site like YouTube? What if multiple links cover a particular topic? Do I make them as a note or classify a particular note as a winner? Is there any point in having a link section at all as every post can technically handle links?
I also want to write about media I’ve consumed. Fair enough but what metadata should they have? How to handle multiple authors and cases where a particular piece of media is at a URL and available physically? If I watch or read an entire series, how do I comment on all of them–in pieces or as a whole? On the other hand, what if I have nothing to say about it? I just enjoyed it for its own sake and I’d like to suggest it to my (non-existent) readers, but a blank post is wasteful? Some media (like Spud) are in multiple mediums1, should they be separate or combined?
This just scratches the surface. There are other things like whether I should separate my tech content or shove in all in one place. Biggest of all is how to structure it in a way that makes Hugo happy with its complex content management system2?
I don’t even know where to start at getting better at this. People get degrees in this shit. They’re called librarians, which I’m not (though I worked for some).
This resource from NNGroup seems useful and I’ll go through it once I have time. For now, I’ll just write shit and send set up a redirect once I figure this out since cool URLs last forever. My site is a digital garden, I should lean into it.