Improving Content Organization (reader responses requested)

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So, we’ve been growing a bunch lately, not only in traffic, but in the amount of content found on the site. I am not a big fan of a huge list down the side, mostly because the list will continue to grow outrageously long. Jose and I have been brainstorming our ideas, but so far, no perfect solution has come forth. So I figured I would just open the discussion up to our readers. Anyone have any ideas?

One idea we had was to divide the companies/content into business types. So architecture firms would be grouped together, web companies would be grouped together, and so on.

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Comments

http://www.microsoft.com Bill Gates

How about a alphabetical breadcrumb
Johan

RE: Alpha breadcrumb

This type of taxonomy doesn’t work for a site like this, since alphabetical breadcrum implies that a person know what they are looking for (i.e. which company). I am pretty sure that this site relies on discovery of content (clicking and seeing what is there)

From a UI/UX perspective, I would suggest chunking the left hand navigation into categories, as well as including a “Featured” or “New” list of 5-8 companies so that they are easily accessible.

You could go into a hierarchical structure, where it is laid out in this manner: Top > Category Index > Company

This way each category has a landing page and users can peruse and compare similar companies against themselves. This page would also lend some SEO benefit as well, as I would imagine the individual company pages do now.

Since a lot of the companies you review are new media companies, I’d make the categories less superficial and go into layouts (Open, Cubes, Closed Floor Space, etc). This would give the user a more structured idea of where they are going and what is behind the curtain.

Just my .02 as a UI/UX/Product Guy.
http://vanlandw.com vanlandw

My suggestion would be just keep the most popular listing on main pages with a link to an archive of all the sites on your top nav bar where

* Home
* About
* Advertise
* Contact
* Submit
* Store
* Archive

In wordpress you should be able to make a separate page to put the growing archive on.
Paige

Categorizing by geographic location would be nice too… I have an idea where some of these offices are, but would love to know what is near me!
http://www.gosquared.com/ Jimmy G

As previous commenters have said, it would make sense to break the list into sub categories. From a UI point of view, I would recommend using a javascript drop down to hide the information while it’s not needed.

An example of this is at http://www.liquidicity.com/ to the right in the sidebar. Basically click to show more.
http://www.smitholi.com smitholi

I don’t mind how it looks now i just keep up by checking the RSS Feed, how about a drop-down list?
http://www.petebernardo.com Pete

At the end of the day it is about the pictures. No matter what categories you put them in I don’t think it will do the pictures justice. I think you could probably start tagging the posts with keywords that are related to the pictures, those are going to be the most important categories anyways. Who would know that a Japanese Architectural firm would have cool looking huts, etc. If you don’t tag the posts that data won’t be exposed.

Besides the tags I think a gallery page with the date the post was made, company name,and a single thumbnail representing the post would be cool. Users can cycle through all the posts at once look at the photos and get a good idea of what they are looking for.

Hit me up if you need any wordpress help to do it.
http://chacha.com Kyle

I think you need multiple filters. Another of my favorite sites has a good example of this: http://www.autoblog.com/

Auto News, Auto Shows, Auto Types, Automakers.

You could do something similar with Company Types (technology, finance, etc), Geographic, Office Style (traditional, contemporary, modern, etc), etc.

My $0.02.
Johan

Haha, I wanted to check back and my gut feeling was correct. This comment conversation looks like most user testing I’ve run when we don’t give much structure to the discussion.

Everyone will have their preferences, so you have to design with the data set in mind and the usability will come from that iteratively.
http://visualsnare.typepad.com/ Reed

Exactly, it’s these preferences that you want to tap into, but you might be better off by using a poll of these layout iterations.

Another thought is that you could frame the discussion different. Ask us specific, relevant questions about the current experience and then we might be able to help more. There was an insight above that happened, where someone came into the site with the expectation to be able to search geographically. You never know, there might be other people that have this same want?

Anyway, love the site, just a couple thoughts to continue the discussion.
http://visualsnare.typepad.com/ Reed

edit: re-read your post. You’ve already realized the correlation between lack of structure and random feedback. My bad!
http://www.netiq.com David Shephard

We are facing a similar issue with our community site (to be launched in a few weeks). Alphabetical, industry vertical, solution, geographical, clouds, lists, drop downs, static etc. all have their pros and cons.

What we concluded is that every site user has their own modus operandi. With that in mind I’d suggest: a short ‘new’ list, a short ‘most popular’ list (as an aside: how are you rating that anyway?) and a search function, with multiple criteria which would require tagging each post: company name, industry, location (city, country).

You can then use the search terms used to help understand what your audience wants. If a high volume of user are searching for pharmaceutical under industry then you might consider expanding in that direction.

Anyway, that is my 2 cents.

Whatever you decide, I can’t see it distracting me from browsing on a regular basis just to see who/what I stumble upon.

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Improving Content Organization (reader responses requested)

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