Your Website: Organized Filing Cabinet or Junk Drawer?

Imagine a prospective student lands on your department's website, ready to discover what makes your music program special. Two minutes later, frustrated by poor navigation and scattered information, they're already browsing a different university's well-organized site.

We all know how frustrating it can be when you visit a website you think will have the answers you are searching for, but when you start browsing, things are a mess! It shows when a website is not regularly updated and its content is not maintained for accuracy and structure. 

In the academic world, this can determine whether a prospective student applies to grad school to work with you or whether a top candidate applies to your job posting.

As a website administrator, it's up to you to keep your website organized, with relevant and easy-to-find content! The process of organizing and labeling your website content in a helpful way that will guide users through your website is known as information architecture, and there are some simple ways to do this using your ISU Sites website! 

You've probably added a stray tag or selected a stream term for your content without giving it a second thought, just because it's what you were trained to do. If you really want to understand your website's potential for serving content, let's add some strategy to your process.

Your website's filing system

Think of your website as a massive filing cabinet. Without a sound filing system, things are going to get lost (or, rather, not be found), and content creation efforts will not meet their potential.

The ISU Sites platform uses the concepts of content types, taxonomies, and views. In our filing cabinet analogy, content types are the different drawers, taxonomies are the labeled folders within each drawer, and views are the lists of content you want to find in your cabinet!

Content types: your filing cabinet drawers

"Content type" is the formal name for each type of content you can produce on your website. Your site comes pre-loaded with these "drawers":

• Basic pages
• Blog posts
• Events
• News articles
• People profiles
• Projects
• Resources
• Landing pages

Each content type has pre-set fields, specific to the function of the content. For example, when you create a new event, you get fields for:

• Title field
• Alternate URL field (used for sharing external events)
• Event date
• Location
• Body field
• Summary field
• Thumbnail image field

Plus, two distinctive fields are used to organize your content: streams and tags (you may not see these fields if you do not have a large site).

Taxonomies: the labeling system in your filing cabinet

A taxonomy is a system for labeling things. There could be a system applied to each drawer, or a shared system you use in all the drawers. Technically, the taxonomies are libraries of terms used to categorize content. There are multiple libraries available to add terms to: one for each content type (streams) and a shared library across all content (tags).

Streams: labelled file folders

Each content type has its own term library called the stream (News stream, Project stream, Events stream, etc.).

The Department of Music and Theatre might use:

• News Stream: Student Spotlights, Alumni Achievements, Faculty Updates
• Event Stream: Concert, General Recital, Senior Recital

The Yard and Garden extension site might use:

• News Stream: Lawn Care, Fruits and Veggies, Houseplants, Pests
• Resource Stream: Publications, How-Tos, At-Home Activities

Website admins decide the small list of terms should be available to categorize content. This might seem limiting, but restricting the list to a small size is essential to prevent your website from becoming a mess of random, less strategic categories.  Keeping the stream libraries closed (that is, you decide on terms in advance rather than adding them on-the-fly) means your site's information architecture will stay refined.

If you need a new stream term, email websupport@iastate.edu. We'll add it for everyone on your site to use.

After the new term is added, you can select the term from the stream drop-down filter. For the Department of Music and Theatre, you see the following stream selection:

Now, you've got a new folder in your content type drawer, and your team is ready to start organizing!

Tags: the colorful sticky notes

While streams are the permanent folder labels, tags are your more flexible organizing option - like color-coded sticky notes found throughout all the drawers. Tags are an open taxonomy, meaning that once enabled, all editors on your website can add terms whenever a new term is needed. 

Let's say you're a music and theatre website manager. Your event streams already organize content by topics: concert, general recital, and senior recital.

But with tags, you can get more specific:

• "General Recital" stream + "orchestra" tag
• "Concert" stream + "band" tag
• "Senior recital" stream + "choir" tag

This creates a web of connections that helps visitors narrow down results as they look for the best content for their needs. 

Unlike streams where you can select only one term, tags allow you to add as many terms to a piece of content as you need; however, it's important to be strategic. Remember that the goal here is to help visitors find the content area they are looking for. If you start adding tags without thinking about how they group together with your other content, you'll have many tags with only one piece of content associated with it. This doesn't help a visitor find what they need quicker, in fact, it might just make them more lost. (We like to call this tag soup)

Once you have established a system for your tags, consider displaying them for your visitors. Our team can enable this feature on your website. Each tag becomes a link allowing visitors to explore all content assigned to the tag term.

Views: your content reading list

A view is a tool used to display lists of your content. Think of a view as asking your website for a subset of content: "Show me all published events in the concert stream labeled by title and date of event, and sorted by most recent first."

Email the details of the view you'd like to create to our team, along with how you plan to use it. If you plan to share the view with your visitors, we can give it a URL or place it on a landing page.

Your action plan: start small, think big

Now that you know how your website is organized, you can begin transforming the structure.

First, decide whether your website has enough content that adding taxonomies would be useful. If you only have ten news articles, and produce five a year, adding streams might be overkill. Only add this if it will improve the experience of your visitors. Consider content planning first.

If you feel your website could benefit from refining your information architecture, follow these steps:

This Week:

1. Pick one content type that you want visitors to browse more (like News or Events).
2. Look at your most recent ten pieces of content.
3. Note what streams and tags you used. Are they consistent?
4. Note if no streams or tags are used consider what might make sense to help organize the content.

This Month:

1. Decide whether your website has enough content to warrant using streams.
2. Email websupport@iastate.edu with 3-5 stream categories that would help organize your content.
3. Create a simple "tag strategy" for your team. Decide on 10-15 tags you can all use consistently.
4. Consider reviewing all the tags on your website and purging unused or less important ones (ask us about helping with this list).

Ongoing:

• Before publishing new content, ask: "How will visitors find this content?"
• Be consistent with term use!
• Check your website analytics to see which content is hard to find

Remember: Staying organized with your taxonomies creates pathways for your visitors to discover exactly what they need. That's the difference between a website that works for you and one that works against you.

Need help getting started? Our team is here to help you create a content organization strategy that works for your specific goals. Email websupport@iastate.edu.