Website clickthrough navigation

CallieO

Having a discussion about website design.

I am very conscious about clickthrough and over complicating a sites navigation.

So in a mad moment I said more visitors were lost through too many clickthroughs to content ( blush)

And have been told that its about clear navigation.

If it takes three clicks to see the content, thats two many for my liking. I weant hooks on the home page, tasters for the content and links direct....


Opinions?

democrates

CallieO wrote: »

Having a discussion about website design.

I am very conscious about clickthrough and over complicating a sites navigation.

So in a mad moment I said more visitors were lost through too many clickthroughs to content ( blush)

And have been told that its about clear navigation.

If it takes three clicks to see the content, thats two many for my liking. I weant hooks on the home page, tasters for the content and links direct....


Opinions?

I think you're right, sounds like search and sitemap if you haven't already got them might be worth considering if there's a lot of content.

I remember using yahoo reminded my of the local library - "would that be in humanities or...", then google got rid of the need to learn an ontology and now most people never go past page 3 of their search results.

CallieO

democrates wrote: »

I remember using yahoo reminded my of the local library - "would that be in humanities or...", then google got rid of the need to learn an ontology and now most people never go past page 3 of their search results.

Now its tagging......

As for search and google - page 3 is a rarity lol

Something we produced for LIS and HE sector in the UK...

http://searchwiki.wikispaces.com/

democrates

CallieO wrote: »

Now its tagging......

As for search and google - page 3 is a rarity lol

Something we produced for LIS and HE sector in the UK...

http://searchwiki.wikispaces.com/

Interesting site there.

Tagging horrified me at first. I was at the European Conference on Digital Libraries in Rome in '02, and so much effort was going into advocacy for Dublin Core and various interoperability standards for collections, it was all about order.

Your site flags the risk of disorder with tags and proposes the mediated solution. I think the disorder of tags offers an oppertunity as each tag for the same resource can add value. Imagine all the possible tags for a photo of a yellow convertible beetle on a beach at night and people having a barbeque nearby, the tags probably most often describe different facets of the resource, but could be synonyms, they could imply context or the consumers perspective.

I'm guessing the mediation process you mention is not purely a pre-tag exercise, but includes ongoing post-tag processing so that the tag cloud can be reduced (eg stemming to combine "happy" and "hapiness") and after clicking a tag, similar and more specific tags can be offered to refine the search. For specialised fields with defined ontologies it's easier, but for general collections it needs collaboration, enter the semantic web with great promises, but still making mistakes!

CallieO

democrates wrote: »

Your site flags the risk of disorder with tags and proposes the mediated solution. I think the disorder of tags offers an oppertunity as each tag for the same resource can add value. Imagine all the possible tags for a photo of a yellow convertible beetle on a beach at night and people having a barbeque nearby, the tags probably most often describe different facets of the resource, but could be synonyms, they could imply context or the consumers perspective.

I'm guessing the mediation process you mention is not purely a pre-tag exercise, but includes ongoing post-tag processing so that the tag cloud can be reduced (eg stemming to combine "happy" and "hapiness") and after clicking a tag, similar and more specific tags can be offered to refine the search. For specialised fields with defined ontologies it's easier, but for general collections it needs collaboration, enter the semantic web with great promises, but still making mistakes!

Yes with specialised fields it is certainly easier, however the concept of collaboration is very appealing.

As for the semantic web - the search habits are already changing in anticipation, putting multiple words into the search field.
Interesting searches:

http://www.whatiss.com/
http://pipl.com/Which manages to search the deep web.
My personal favourite of the moment - searches real time topics of interest
http://search.twitter.com/


What did you think about the Steve museum social tagging project? I thought it was an interesting project.

democrates

CallieO wrote: »

Yes with specialised fields it is certainly easier, however the concept of collaboration is very appealing.

As for the semantic web - the search habits are already changing in anticipation, putting multiple words into the search field.
Interesting searches:

http://www.whatiss.com/
http://pipl.com/Which manages to search the deep web.
My personal favourite of the moment - searches real time topics of interest
http://search.twitter.com/


What did you think about the Steve museum social tagging project? I thought it was an interesting project.

Thanks for the links there.

The Steve project looks interesting ok with solid funding in situ, as a developer the availability of a tool under LGPL is always good news. Now I haven't tried it so this could be complete hogwash, they mention it is a tool to publish and tag collections, that makes me wonder how well it could be integrated into the likes of drupal to capitalise on the nebula of such sites.

General public access may not be in the plan though:

The steve team is developing a plan for storing and registering data sets collected by project participants. The data sets will be identified through a registry that will allow researchers to understand the deployment environment in which the data was collected. Qualified researchers will be able to study the data sets and, where permitted by the collecting institution, license them for analysis.

"Project participants" may suggest that to make sure the meta-metadata is as reliable as possible, specialists will have quailified submitted tags of public origin with reference to the existing ontologies, eg a standard categorisation for the Mona Lisa would accompany all of its public tags.

If it takes off and is as useful as expected for the consumer, either they open it up for general use or someone else will create a public replica, probably defaulting to creative commons license and plugins for the popular cms's will follow.

But how would a public facility compare with the expert one? Britannica v Wikipedia would suggest that the public information supply can yield a very valuable resource because it includes experts, if the Steve project are buying that with tags why not go the whole hog. Methinks the instinct for collection curators to jealously guard their collections still needs some work

CallieO

LOVE the collection curators guarding their collections!!!

Are we carefully steering clear of respository policies lol


I am just reading about automated metadata generator.....

http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/dcdot/

hkcharlie

CallieO wrote: »

Opinions?

I'm not entirely sure what your site is or how much info there is, but I agree with easy navigation. Or also think you should be able to navigate to any page from any page your on.

If it's enormous maybe use Google Adsense for search ?

delllat

democrates wrote: »

I think you're right, sounds like search and sitemap if you haven't already got them might be worth considering if there's a lot of content.

I remember using yahoo reminded my of the local library - "would that be in humanities or...", then google got rid of the need to learn an ontology and now most people never go past page 3 of their search results.

People go to page 3 on google searches?

thats rare

hkcharlie

delllat wrote: »

People go to page 3 on google searches?
thats rare

Maybe there's something there like poor, British tabloid press! :rolleyes: