I Killed My Categories and Archives and No One Noticed
Posted by junger - 06/21/07 at 09:06:59 pmOver at the Online Savings Blog, I made a change that any print publisher would never even consider doing.
I killed my categories and my archives. And no one noticed.
The hardest thing to explain to an old media publisher is that Web users don't care about the way that you categorize your information.
They don't care about the buckets you create to hold your stories. They don't care about when you published a story (unless the date is relevant to the story).
If they're looking for information, they won't take a top-down approach to find it. Way back in 2000, Web guru Jakob Nielsen said that no one uses navigation — and it's still true.
They'll search for it.
They'll find it through contextually relevant links in the body of stories.
They'll click on contextually relevant tags or meta keywords to find similar stories.
They won't click on the "Money" category, then click on the "January 2007" archive, then go through three pages of stories.
I haven't had a listing of categories or archives on this site for some time now. Did anyone notice?
Even I didn't … and I'm the publisher.
No Comments yet »
RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URI
Leave a comment
Powered by WordPress with GimpStyle Theme design by Horacio Bella.
Entries and comments feeds.
Valid XHTML and CSS.