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Keeping the previous structure intact
Keeping the previous structure intact is an vital commitment for information architects. Moving forward is required for success, but maintaining continuity with the past is essential to maintaining balance. This concept is rather broad, but can be illustrated in a few examples.
Imagine, for example, you have a website which sells hundreds of products that are poorly organized. Let us say you sell books. You have a category for "Romance," another for "Renaissance Literature," another for "Robert Louis Stevenson," and yet another for "Hardbacks." What is wrong with this picture?
Bascially, the main issue here is that a static category structure (if one must be used at all) should remain as simple as possible. Specifically, any category structure must be centered about one and only one attribute. Described above are category names which reference four different types of attributes: Genre, Time, Author, Hardback/Paperback.
The short solution is to reduce the category scheme to one attribute, and then delegate the remaining category attributes to the product level. In other words, if Genre was decided upon as the key attribute, and it was decided that an edition of Remembrance of Things Past should be placed into it, certain field values would be associated with this product to compensate for the lost categories. Time=19th century, Author= Marcel Proust, Cover=Hardback, etc.
From this point, with some basic coding, the user should be able to "drill down" to the exact, desired product will little effort, only by knowing beforehand the genre he/she desired.
How then, do we implement a new, more intelligent structure, while keeping the previous structure intact? There are a number of techniques involved here. But you can first be sure that any old urls used in your site (for example, if your site has high ranking pages indexed in the search engines, or links from other high traffic web sites) will remain active following the transition. The goal is not to kill the old urls immediately, but to phase them out gradually, at a natural pace, as the new structure takes effect.
In order to learn more about how Informationarchitech can clean up your website categories, while keeping the previous structure intact, click here to request a free consultation.