Here’s another gem from Jared Spool’s User Interface Engineering blog. This an excerpt from Ginny Redish’s book “Letting Go of the Words: Writing Web Content that Works” (which I have been threatening to buy for myself). This post, “Breaking Up Large Documents for the Web” is actually Part 1 of 3.

Sometimes you have content that needs the web just to get the right distribution to the right audience. But reading, like writing, for the web is different than for print.

I would use this article as your starting point. Then start thinking like your visitors and then do the common sense test.

I found this post, How I draft an information architecture from the DonnaM blog through Jared Spool’s UIE Tips email and I thought I’d share it.
This is not exactly how I would do it but it is one way to get an IA together. The most important point really is that you DO an IA For Every Site. It’s a very cheap way to get your thoughts together before you begin coding. And paint yourself into a corner.

Enjoy!

Check out this  post over at UIE’s Brain Sparks. It’s a re-publish of something from 2003 but has some good points.

My comment on the post is pointed at a missing reference: What role does “production value” or “macro design” have in audience acceptance of a web property’s design?

A very web design-centric but good post here on the Web Design Process. It’s so close I can almost taste it!

The list of process steps are:

1. Know what you’re doing
2. Know what the site needs to do (Is this “Goal”?)
3. Know what the site’s visitors want (When did we figure out who the “Audience” would be?)
4. Get a good picture of the personality and style of the web site
5. Sketch out highly successful scenarios
6. Organise views into a site map
7. Sketch the essential features & look
8. Map your visitors’ attention
9. Arrange the visual elements to work together

I suppose we can make the assumption that the author has already figured out the who, why and what.

Right?