Content Strategy Development: Aligning an IA with our Site’s (and our Content’s) Purpose

Content on the Web Publishing Guide is designed to assist Australian Government agencies to:

• Identify their legal and policy obligations
• Meet their legal and policy obligations
• Establish, manage and decommission their website(s)
• Apply web-based technologies to achieve their business goals

Users may (we can’t stress the ‘may’ bit enough) be able to navigate this content in one (or more) of several potential information architectures driven by:

• Topic (e.g. Visual Design and Branding →  Branding → Design Elements)
• Role

“I’m just a content author.  How do I meet the requirements?”

“I’ve been a web manager before, but this is my first time in government.  How is it different?”

• Website Life-Cycle:

“We’re moving from our initial planning stages into a design phase.  What do we need to know?”

• Compliance-Level, potentially answering the question:

“I’ve met the minimum requirements, what are the best practice recommendations for newer, or less common technologies?”

Supporting Multiple Discovery Paths

We recognise that there are many ways for visitors to our site to discover content – there are just as many ways that the content could be organised in a way that ‘makes sense’ for any given visitor.

Let’s take a sample page from the site (Online Content Requirements), and look at the many and varied ways it could be categorised:

Parent Topic(s)

• Types of Content

Role(s)

• Content Author(s)
• Communications Staff
• Executive Sponsor(s)

Website Life-Cycle Stage(s)

• Initial Planning
• Ongoing
• Decommissioning

Document Type

• Guidance

Compliance Level(s)

• Mandatory

Related Topic(s)

• File Lists
• Contracts Disclosure
• Accessibility
• Archiving
• Preserving Publications
• Copyright and Copyright Notices
• Disclaimers
• Privacy and Privacy Statements

Adding a less-structured, free-flowing tagging system may also be a useful means of discovering related content on the site, and further boost keyword-based search relevance:

Tag(s)

• grants, oisos, privacy-statement, file-lists, contact-information, public-notices, media-releases, tabled-in-parliament

Multi-IA ROI

Previously, only a topic-based (and, to a lesser extent, compliance level-based) IA has been implemented.  If we decide to pursue multiple IAs, we’ll have to train our content authors slightly differently to encourage them to use all of the available categorisation options.

Once the categorisation data is in, the site will then be able to take advantage of it through enhanced internal and external search, and increasingly relevant navigation pathways. Much of this enhanced navigation can be rendered dynamically, but a subject matter expert will still need to be on hand to craft custom navigation landing pages, highlighting individual topices or pieces of guidance as required.