RonAkanowicz's blog

 

"If we don't succeed, we run the risk of failure." Anonymous, often attributed to Dan Quayle

Determining if your website project will be a success or failure is tricky. It's like trying to decide if the pizza you're about to eat will be good or bad (which can be a trick question- when is pizza ever that bad?). 

"An intellectual is a man who takes more words than necessary to tell more than he knows." -Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890 - 1969)

I've blogged about the importance of personas as they generally relate to the development process (see "How to Create Effective Personas for Your Projects, Part 1", "How to Create Effective Personas for Your Projects, Part 2", and "How to Use Personas in Your Projects, Part 3").

"Drawing on my fine command of the English language, I said nothing."   - Robert Benchley (1889 - 1945)

The Importance of NGOs

In today's information-saturated world it's easy to feel overwhelmed by the issues that are challenging our planet: climate change, poverty, hunger, health care, and energy. Often we depend on our governments to provide leadership and promote solutions for these problems, but too often the resources needed to have an impact far outweigh what any one institution can handle. NGOs (Non-Governmental Institutions) and Nonprofit organizations often step in where governments leave off, either providing direct services or advocating on behalf of an issue or constituency for government action or support.

"There are some that only employ words for the purpose of disguising their thoughts." -Voltaire (1694 - 1778)

While most web projects only focus on the engineering of the site, the most critical component for a successful site launch is the content. All too often the content is an afterthought; a last minute exercise of copying old content from an existing site to your shiny new site. However, content is the reason visitors are coming to your site at all, whether that content is text, video, images, or audio. How easily the content can be found lies in the domain of information architecture, but what gets found is the domain of content strategy.

There are many reasons why employing a content strategist can help your website- from managing your content workflow to assessing your competitors content. But often times an organization feels just because there is content on the site that everything is okay. That may work for a while, until you start to see a measurable decline in its vital signs.

Employing a content strategist in your organization may be beyond your budget. So how can you reap some of the benefits of having someone to look after your content while exercising fiscal restraint?

In "How to Create Effective Personas for Your Projects, Part 1" I wrote about the three main components of effective personas: A name, a face, and an ecology (biographical data, lifestyle, and preferences).

Like any relatively new field of study Information Architecture is still trying to define itself. Is it a practice in and of itself? Or is it/should it be part of a broader field that uses other tools and produces additional artifacts? The IA Summit endeavored to create a dialog around what this practice can actually encompass when considering users' interactions with information. The summit itself intimated at our need to begin bridging the gap between traditional IA (links and pages) and the burgeoning social and semantic web (contexts and connections). First, the theme of the summit was "Expanding Our Horizons," suggesting the practice look beyond those tools and techniques we've come to know and love (hi sitemaps).

In "How to Create Effective Personas for Your Projects, Part 1" I wrote about the three main components of effective personas: A name, a face, and an ecology (biographical data, lifestyle, and preferences). Creating personas that are a reflection of real people helps us as web designers and developers to empathize with our end users and more easily consider needs, goals, and priorities that may be different than our own.

"Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth." -Oscar Wilde I don't know how to say it any more plainly than this: Creating personas is important. The persona is so important because it affects so many other pieces of the project -- discovery, design, QA, and even search engine optimization. A persona is the answer to the question "who are we doing all this work for?". What you know about him or her will inform your choices about how your site will be found, how it will look and how it will function. Budgeting for personas is always time and money well spent.