I’m talking solely about content-rich websites here.
Have you ever tried explaining what information architecture is? It’s hard. Not that long ago, I probably didn’t know it myself. I don’t do IA of course, but I work with them… I think working with information architects is the key to getting any reasonably sophisticated website working well.
Design is all well and good too. Making a site look pretty is important. Design can help to realise some of the underyling goals around how users actually use the site, consume the content, interact with it, and so on. But it can’t be thought of in isolation from the underlying architecture – the structure, the rules, the logic, that drive the site.
Found a couple of good descriptions of IA at something called the ‘Support group for information architecture‘. Are IA people so misunderstood they need a support group? Anyhow:
IA encompasses all the design and structure from the back-end to through the content…
This was from a woman at Microsoft. I truncated it because it got a bit vague at that point.
IA is the practice of creating plans that describe the underlying organizational structure for a system of content and interactions.
This was from a guy at Sapient.
I don’t know why I care about this as I’m not an IA. But I sympathise with people in difficult-to-describe roles. And, as a journalist/editor involved in a big website, you must get quite involved with the IA of the site if you want it to be any more than just a bunch of content slapped up on the web.
Other definitions I have found in my 47-second search around the web are too general or too jargon-heavy for an editorial audience. But as a general explanation, I liked this O’Reilly book suggestion: (paraphrased) ‘I’m the person who sorts out the information overload’. The authors also suggest describing oneself as a web librarian, but I think this is a little inaccurate.
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