Content Management Matters ™

The first step in creating a genuinely useful intranet is to ban the intranet team from using the word "information".

On a whole, the art of Web design has begun to be better understood as a necessity in the world of ecommerce and content management. After all, content is only as good as its design and vice versa. Once viewed as something that made your site look pretty but had little significance to the bottom line, web design is now considered an integral part of a site's success.

It's that time of year again. No, not the holidays; end-of-the-year salary surveys, of course. Like clock work, the Information Architecture Institute released their 2007 IAI Salary Survey and it looks like the gender pay gap is narrowing, if ever so slightly.

This is the first year the IAI chose to include a question on gender, which they say "provided the most interesting result coming out of our salary survey to date."

Calling all information architects!

Being the planners and navigators that you are, I'm sure you already have April 12 -14 penciled into your Moleskine planners.

Those are the dates for the 2008 Information Architecture Summit in Miami, Florida. This year's summit is dedicated to "Experiencing Information," addressing in particular the experiences in which a user is doing something.

The Information Architecture Institute, an organization that works to improve information architecture across networks of organizations through education, research and advocacy, has an amazing idea!

Well, they have lots of great ideas, but in a transparent attempt to be clever, I'm referring to their upcoming IDEA Conference 2007.

Functionality and usefulness are far more important to the success of your website than how nice and elegant it looks.

In the design of physical products, the use of words is often seen as a sign of a flaw of the design. On the contrary, in web design, without words, there is no design.

A key danger in website design is over-ambition. We need to design a website we can professionally manage.

The success of Google proves that if you manage content professionally, tremendous value is delivered.

As Web 2.0 becomes more than a buzzword, many information architects are being asked to go beyond organizing the structure of today's websites and page layouts. Such a shift has been well recognized and explored in Lou Rosenfeld's latest update to Information Architecture for the World Wide Web.

If you're of the info architecture ilk and love Las Vegas (who doesn't!), then this month's IA Institute conference and the pre-conference workshop -- Designing with Structured Data -- is the place to be.

Reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated, said the pale beast.

And so it came to pass that on the 12th month in the 6th year of big numbers the polar bear rose. He from a comfortable perch held forth to the internauts, exclaiming in 526 pages of soft cover that far from a death knell for information analysis and vigor, the folksy chorus of asynchronous requests and micro-content suggestions heralded yes, change, and yes, challenge but nothing so alarming as the end of a fine young science.

Or in fewer words, O'Reilly Media, Lou Rosenfeld and Peter Morville have completed and are shipping the 3rd edition of "Information Architecture for the World Wide Web", as updated for the post-Ajaxian, Web 2.0 world.