Information Architecture

We're pressing ahead with our redesign and migration into Drupal of our flagship site. We created a .jpg image of the basic layout and "look-and-feel" we want for our new site that now needs to be realized as a Drupal theme.

So, I put out the word on groups.drupal.org, Twitter and in a few other more local spots online and the response was immediate and plentiful. Seems there are many individuals and firms that do custom Drupal theming. We were pretty sure we just needed a custom themer to adapt something like the Zen theme but lacked the specific skills here (nor the time for that matter) to do it.

I chose an India-based firm called Designs2Drupal and the experience, so far, as been excellent. They were very professional extremely fast - after a 20-minute Skype call and a few emails explaining what we needed, they produced an initial theme from a simple .jpg mockup at no cost for us to evaluate in under 24 hours hosted on their servers. They are now doing some "final" tweaking and will deliver us the theme and then we pay. A very smart way to do business, I reckon, as when people see the work you do before payment, they are more likely to follow with your services. I would definitely recommend them.

We will, of course, be tweaking the theme over the next few months to get it just how we want it, but we have in-house staff that know CSS, etc. and will likely work with a local design firm for the more complicated bits. But, to get us going with this process quickly, I highly recommend having a custom Theme developed quickly via a service like the one mentioned above.

We are still working on re-doing our IA and writing and developing our taxonomies in Drupal - what I like to call "the intellectual work." Not that design and theming don't require intelligence - of course they do. It's just that re-labeling menu items and re-doing a confused information architecture are task that no amount of technology can complete for you. So, we're wrapping up our IA processes with taxonomy creation and moving from our content audit > content modelling > personas > user journeys into some hands-on content migration and re-design. To do this, it helps to have a functioning theme in one's Drupal installation!

Note: I have retired 'The Weekly Drupal' column in favor of simply writing about Drupal as topics arise. During our first 6 months of development this year, I could easily write weekly posts as I was new to Drupal. As we move into our content migration phase, I have less time but will still write about Drupal often. You can see my old Weekly Drupal posts here.

A while back, I wrote about taxonomies in Drupal - see post. We're now at the point where we're creating first drafts of our main taxonomies - a "master" taxonomy for organizing more or less ALL content on our flagship site and a few auxiliary ones for information like news and archives.

So, I'm revisiting some of the links and presentations from my previous post and doing some more research on how best to go about creating our taxonomies. There is an interesting discussion here, by the way, on the whole nodes/content types vs. taxonomy for organizing content in Drupal sites in which I definitely feel, with my limited Drupal knowledge (3-4 months as a user), that making everything a taxonomy is NOT the way to go. Content types and taxonomies are nicely complementary and should be kept that way.

Anyway, we've been in an IARD (Information Architecture Re-Design) process for about 9 months now and have so far created or done the following:

• Domain model
• Content audit
• Personas
• some user interviews in the form of conversation with stakeholders, information gathered through a wiki, some polling and surveys
• Wireframing and prototyping

and are doing some content modeling (slightly out-of-order!) now. The domain model, content modeling exercises and content audit are all informing the creation of our "master" taxonomy. It's tricky stuff. I'm a librarian by training and thus have some significant experience with many classification systems (Dewey, LC, Dublin Core, etc.). But, keeping things simple and allowing for flexibility (not letting the level of specificity get too high or granular) is difficult.

So, here's what I'm reading to help:

• Lullabot: Drupalcon: Information Architecture to Drupal Architecture (and associated presentation)
• Content Modeling article
• Morville and Rosenfeld's Information Architecture for the World Wide Web - beginning on page 313
• Using Drupal - page 59-61

as well as other IA resources. We're still at least 6 months away from the data & content migration phase so we have time to play around with various taxonomies and how they can help fix our confused IA.

We are still commited to only using 2 of the 3 types of vocabularies that Drupal offers, namely: simple lists of terms and organized hierarchies of terms. We are not planning to allow any free tagging of content initially. So, the taxonomies we employ will, at first, only be used "behind-the-scenes" for content editors to organize content and to aid users in navigation and creation of RSS feeds.

This could prove to be the most challenging part of our project so far. But, for me, it will likely be the most exciting and rewarding!

The Weekly Drupal is a weekly column on mavergames.net about Drupal from the perspective of a new user. Use this feed to subscribe.

Okay, we have our first Acquia Drupal installation in our cloud. Now working through some important configuration/backend information architecture decisions that will likely affect all we do going forward with Drupal. One of the biggest and actually most basic decisions we've made is whether to have one master drupal installation/MySQL database to run all 80-odd sites we manage or to have one master installation of Drupal with 70-odd separate sites (subdomains) each with their own "installation profile" of Drupal and their own MySQL database. The latters seems to be the best choice for us for many reasons:

Information Architecture TV

Journal of Information Architecture

 "The Journal of Information Architecture is a peer-reviewed scholarly journal. Its aim is to facilitate the systematic development of the scientific body of knowledge in the field of information architecture.

The Journal of Information Architecture is going to be published biannually in English and Volume 1, Issue 1 is coming out March 31st 2009.

The Call for Papers for Volume 1, Issue 2, to be published Autumn 2009, is now out."