#29676
Strategies for Improving Enterprise Search
Acquiring and installing a search engine is just the beginning of creating an effective enterprise search system. John Ferrara walks us through strategies for addressing critical aspects of the user experience often overlooked or ignored.
Ferrara, John. Boxes and Arrows (2007). Articles>Web Design>Information Design>Search Engine Optimization
#24224
Studies in Hypertext: the Conversion of Traditional Texts into Web Sites 
The production of a web page has become a common assignment in a number of university classrooms, but there has yet to be established a pedagogy for the generation of large group-generated web sites that replicate the methods found in industry. In Studies in Hypertext, a course offered to technical communication students at the University of Central Florida, such a pedagogy is being shaped. In this course, students with little or no experience in web site generation work their way through a series of written and small web site construction tasks to eventually produce one complex and competently-integrated web site.
Applen, J.D. STC Proceedings (1999). Articles>Web Design>Information Design>Hypertext
#31512
Admit it. Your intranet is a mess. What started out as a great idea for sharing information inside the company has turned into the corporate junk drawer—a jumbled collection of useful, not-so-useful, relevant, irrelevant, redundant, inconsistent and unmanaged stuff. While parts of it make you proud (perhaps the employee directory or news portal), taken as a whole, it just hasn’t lived up to all the grand ideas you had when you posted those first few pages.
Stevenson, Jerry. Communication World Bulletin (2004). Articles>Web Design>Intranets>Information Design
#23218
Toward Usable Browse Hierarchies for the Web 
The goal of the following study was to determine the potential usefulness of tracking traversal patterns through a browse hierarchy as a way to monitor confusion and determine its source. The major conclusion that can be drawn from this study is that this method is a useful and insightful way to monitor user experience.
Risden, Kirsten. Microsoft (1999). Articles>Information Design>Web Design
#26136
I have long wondered why government web sites all over the world tend to use metadata of several different types jumbled together and overlapping. For example, pages with two description metatags or two or three title tags are common. I suspect that most of the replication and confusion has developed for historical reasons.
McAlpine, Rachel. Quality Web Content (2005). Articles>Web Design>Information Design>Metadata
#18708
Yahoo is truly one of the Best of the Net, as it has filled an enormous void in the areas of browsing and searching Internet-based information. So I hope you'll believe that I am truly sad as I predict the death of Yahoo. It seems inevitable, as Yahoo's organization, its information architecture, will collapse under the weight of the high volume of entries. And, unfortunately, searching won't solve the problem of volume.
Rosenfeld, Louis. CMC Magazine (1995). Articles>Information Design>Web Design
#29986
Microformats is a term used to describe the storage of information using simple markup variations within existing markup languages. To a certain extent, microformats describes a methodology or philosophy, and comprises a set of design principles. Microformats is not a new language. It is usually a permutation of XHTML. The philosophy of microformats involves storing data in human-readable formats which are also machine-readable, but the emphasis is on the humans! Information tends to be visible, rather than hidden metadata.
Self, Tony. HyperWrite (2004). Articles>Web Design>Information Design>XHTML
#10676
Web Rings as Computer-Mediated Communication
As recently as 1994, academic journals such as Communication Education were continuing to define 'computer-mediated communication' as a decidedly dialogic or conversational phenomenon. Focusing on such technologies as electronic bulletin boards, the Usenet and email, the journal's articles attempted to come to grips with the 'virtual' dimension of text-based, computerized communication. Four short years later, the Internet has become a much more complex, commercialized, politicized and increasingly networked environment, to the extent that web-based resources--particularly home page addresses-- have become fully integrated and hypertextually linked into 'traditional' CMC dialogic technologies. The widespread use of email and usenet interfaces from Netscape and Microsoft, for instance, have enabled the linking of web addresses within the body of posts. In addition to conversing one-on one, users now increasingly refer, via an automated link, to web-based resources. Granted, users don't communicate with each o
Elmer, Greg. Computer-Mediated Communication (1999). Articles>Information Design>Web Design
#21603
Hace casi tres años comentábamos que la promesa de la web semántica era convertir la red en 'un espacio auto-navegable y auto-comprensible.' ¿Dónde estamos hoy en día?.
Dursteler, Juan Carlos. InfoVis (2003). (Spanish) Articles>Information Design>Web Design>Metadata
#26793
Libraries and librarians can create the kinds of compelling services that will bring our users back. We can't expect a brighter future unless we work hard for it.
Tennant, Roy. Library Journal (2006). Articles>Information Design>Web Design
#25863
Where Does Web Bibliographies' Author Information Come From? 
Web pages cited with personal author identification in 12 longer Web bibliographies and a collection of 19 shorter Web bibliographies were investigated. With one exception, the personal author names could be matched in the visible text of the great majority of pages. Metatags (both for authors and for descriptions) and page titles rarely added any author information. In some cases, frames or inline graphics appeared to be the sources used. Somewhat more frequent probable sources were linked pages, such as home pages.
Craven, Timothy C. First Monday (2005). Articles>Web Design>Information Design
#21363
Where the Wireframes Are: Special Deliverable #3
A wireframe, as you probably know, describes the contents of a web page by illustrating a mock layout. Usually wireframes are rendered in some kind of drawing program, like Visio or Illustrator, but can also appear as bitmaps or even HTML. In his latest installment, Dan Brown, shows how the wireframe can transcend layout and work for all team members.
Brown, Dan. Boxes and Arrows (2002). Articles>Information Design>Web Design
#28272
Wikipedia may be the biggest technical document ever created, but it and other Web 2.0 elements present challenges. Read about the popularity of Wikipedia, then let Intercom know about your professional experiences using wikis, blogs, and other Web 2.0 applications.
Intercom (2006). Articles>Web Design>Information Design>Wikis
#28657
Wireframes can comprise many different patterns, each of which is a discrete element that provides specific functionality and may include instructive copy, images, text fields, buttons, links, etcetera. Together, the patterns create a complete Web page. Of course, when wireframing in patterns, it always helps if there is a pre-existing library of patterns to draw from, but I have found that getting through the first wireframe reveals most of the reusable patterns.
Ellerby, Lindsay. UXmatters (2007). Articles>Information Design>Planning>Web Design
#31865
The Wisdom of Crowds Meets the Wisdom of Authors: How XML Enables the Semantic Web
Combining semantic markup with a granular authoring approach like DITA holds a lot of promise for content creators and consumers alike. Content becomes easy to define and even easier to discover. The combination also holds a lot of promise for the future of the Semantic Web itself. In fact, creating the Semantic Web might be as easy as authoring content in DITA.
Wlodarczyk, Paul. XML.org (2008). Articles>Information Design>Web Design>XML
#29978
XML became an integral part of Microsoft's strategy around the time of Internet Explorer 4. IE4 was an XML-aware browser. As well as displaying HTML documents, it could also display XML documents through an inbuilt XML parser. Another part of IE4 was something known as the XML DSO (Data Source Object). The XML DSO allows you to manipulate primitive XML 'data islands' by binding (or attaching) the XML data to HTML presentation elements. The XML elements within Internet Explorer continue to be improved and added to with every new IE release.
Self, Tony. HyperWrite (2006). Articles>Information Design>XML>Web Browsers
#26877
XML in Firefox 1.5, Part 1: Overview of XML Features
The open source Firefox Web browser continues to grow in popularity. Users like the security and convenience features it offers. Developers like the Firefox attention to standards compliance, inherited from its Mozilla roots. The most recent version, Firefox 1.5, comes with many features for XML developers, including XML parsing, XHTML, CSS, XSLT, SVG, XML Events in JavaScriptâ„¢, and XForms. Additional third-party extensions provide even more XML support. In this article, Uche Ogbuji provides an overview of XML features in Firefox 1.5.
Ogbuji, Uche. IBM (2006). Articles>Information Design>Web Design>XML
#26876
XML in Firefox 1.5, Part 2: Basic XML Processing
This second article in the series, "XML in Firefox 1.5," focuses on basic XML processing. Firefox supports XML parsing, Cascading Stylesheets (CSS), and XSLT stylesheets.
Ogbuji, Uche. IBM (2006). Articles>Information Design>Web Design>XML
#32140
Mapping Memory: Web Designer as Information Cartographer
The rise of the social web demands that we rethink our traditional role as builders of digital monuments, and turn our attention to the close observation of the spaces that our users are producing around us. It’s time for a new metaphor. Consider cartography.
Rester, Aaron. List Apart, A (2008). Articles>Web Design>Information Design
#32239
RELAX NG is not a capitalized misspelling of something you probably get to do all too rarely as a busy programmer and web designer. If you use XML to any great degree, you'll want to take a close look at it. It can help make your life as a web developer easier, allowing you to relax a little more.
McCullough, Peyton. Dev Articles (2008). Articles>Web Design>Information Design>XML
#32240
XML schemas don't have to be rigid. Sometimes, it's best to provide flexibility and allow the author of XML documents to make choices. In this second part of a three-part article, we'll make some modifications to the schema we created in the first part, and learn how to make some things optional.
McCullough, Peyton. Dev Articles (2008). Articles>Web Design>Information Design>XML
#32241
Datatypes and More in RELAX NG
Welcome to the third part of a three-part series on RELAX NG. In this part, we will discuss datatypes, the grammar element, and creating named patterns.
McCullough, Peyton. Dev Articles (2008). Articles>Web Design>Information Design>XML
#32269
The Joint Czech and Slovak Digital Parliamentary Library 
After the split of the Czechoslovak Republic into two republics in 1993 the idea of creating a common digital parliamentary library originated. The Czech Parliamentary Library started this project in 1995 and Slovakia joined in 2002. According to the agreement between of the two parliaments the joint digital library should in its complete shape contain the complete full texts of parliamentary prints (proposals, interpolations, explanations, decisions, invitations) and stenographical documents (shorthand writings) from 1848 until the present, in electronic form. The aim is to create and operate an automatic system of current and historical parliamentary documents. In 2000, the project was awarded the prestigious `Czech @' prize by the International Conference on Internet Use in Public Administration and Self-Government. The Joint Czech and Slovak Digital Parliamentary Library is now widely used in both countries.
Malackova, Eva and Karel Sosna. IFLA Journal (2007). Articles>Information Design>Web Design>Case Studies
#32276
The Folksonomy Tag Cloud: When is it Useful?
The weighted list, known popularly as a `tag cloud', has appeared on many popular folksonomy-based web-sites. Flickr, Delicious, Technorati and many others have all featured a tag cloud at some point in their history. However, it is unclear whether the tag cloud is actually useful as an aid to finding information. We conducted an experiment, giving participants the option of using a tag cloud or a traditional search interface to answer various questions. We found that where the information-seeking task required specific information, participants preferred the search interface. Conversely, where the information-seeking task was more general, participants preferred the tag cloud. While the tag cloud is not without value, it is not sufficient as the sole means of navigation for a folksonomy-based dataset.
Sinclair, James and Michael Cardew-Hall. Journal of Information Science (2008). Articles>Web Design>Information Design>Metadata
#32310
This paper examines emerging trends in the information industry that are likely to be of interest to information professionals during 2008. These include web 2.0, enterprise 2.0, social networking, semantic web, risk management, user-generated content, universal search, crowdsourcing and new roles for information professionals.
Allen, Katherine. Business Information Review (2008). Articles>Information Design>Web Design>Planning
