How should we organize our website? Quite simply, in a way that maximizes the ease users of our website (both community members and the public) have in accomplishing the goals of our community.

Prioritizing

Organizational decissions should be only partially informed by the online features and services we'd like to offer. What is most important is what we'd like to do, not how we do it. Services (such as email, image galleries, discussion groups) are only means to an end.

For example, our website might provide an image posting service where users may upload images to share with eachother. One might think it obvious then to define an image gallery section to our website (and it may be best sometimes). But, what is likely most important to a user is the subject the imagery happens to capture. In fact, they'd probably appreciate having any information related to the subject imagery happens to capture, be it in the form of images located outsite our site's image gallery, movies, stories, or related subjects.

By organizing information only by its type (image) instead of its subject, we're imposing a technical service detail (our website happens to dedicate image uploads to a particular software implemention (which may change in the future)) onto our users. Remember, organize information around how it might be used, instead of what it happens to be.

Descission Process

There are many ways to start…

Categories

Here are some categories (2006-12-10):

Name
Online
-- Roles (Online)
-- Technology
---- Website (Technology)
------ Drupal
-- Website

Implementation

Technical information is available on how categories are created and used.