How Many Links Are Too Many Links?

To understand how much content effluvia we're subjected to, I wanted to see how many links are on the homepage of popular websites. For example, if I go to the homepage of the Huffington Post, I see 720 links, in one shot. Then click inside to a story and you've nearly doubled that number—it ads up pretty quickly. What about the tech blogs? BoingBoing Gadgets, 514. Gizmodo, 468. Engadget 432, all on one page. And on average, fewer than 1% of the links on news sites and blogs actually point to rich content, 99% are navigation and other article headlines. Aggregation site Techmeme has a whopping 1081 links.

Bilton, Nick. O'Reilly and Associates (2009). Articles>Web Design>Information Design>Hypertext

Sub-Headers Are Navigation

Using good sub-headers will help your users find the information they are looking for. It’s like navigation but without the clicking and the cool roll-over effects.

Hamill, David. Good Usability (2009). Articles>Web Design>Information Design>Writing

Building Dynamic Applications With Mozilla, REX and XQuery.

The Mozilla platform offers a rich support of XML techniques, from low level ones (XPath, RDF, DOM, e4x) to rendering dialects like XHTML, SVG, XUL and XForms, thus making this platform a natural choice for the XML inclined. It is becoming a platform of choice when developing rich connected applications. When building dynamic applications, the developer is often facing a common set of programming patterns : gathering data from various remote and local sources, storing data with an optional transformation phase, and updating parts of the GUI to reflect the modifications in the data store. With today's ubiquitous use of XML as a data exchange syntax, a major part of these tasks can be achieved with XML based solutions. In this article we will present an XML centric solution that aims at minimizing the impedance mismatch between different data models that plagues classical architectures involving for instance XML/object/relationnal translation. It combines some of Mozilla's existing capabilities with REX (Remote Events for XML) and a native XML database with XQuery support. REX provides means to update the XUL based GUI and the database, while the XML database is used as a versatile storage engine.

Desré, Fabrice. XML 2006 (2006). Articles>Web Design>Information Design>XML

PHP and XML -- Reusing Other People's Information On The Web

Using Magpie RSS, we will discuss ways to take publicly available information from web-based sources and reuse them on our websites. The session will also feature an overview of ways to pull information from web services such as Amazon.com.

Hastings, Robin. XML 2006 (2006). Articles>Web Design>Information Design>RSS

JSON, The Fat-Free Alternative to XML

JSON is a lightweight, language independent format for data interchange. It is especially popular in Ajax (or interactive web browser-based) applications.

Crockford, Douglas. XML 2006 (2006). Articles>Web Design>Information Design>Ajax

How To Drive Free, Massive Traffic Using Simple RSS  

This report is going to show you a couple of brief, but extremely powerful secrets to increase the traffic to your website. RSS drives frequent search engine (spider) visits and that translates to higher search engine rankings.

Rhodes, John S. and Matthew W. Rhodes. Wordpreneur (2007). Articles>Web Design>Information Design>RSS

Towards Domain-Independent Information Extraction from Web Tables  

Traditionally, information extraction from web tables has focused on small, more or less homogeneous corpora, often based on assumptions about the use of TABLE tags. A multitude of different HTML implementations of web tables make these approaches difficult to scale. In this paper, we approach the problem of domain-independent information extraction from web tables by shifting our attention from the tree-based representation of web pages to a variation of the two-dimensional visual box model used by web browsers to display the information on the screen. The thereby obtained topological and style information allows us to fill the gap created by missing domain-specific knowledge about content and table templates. We believe that, in a future step, this approach can become the basis for a new way of large-scale knowledge acquisition from the current 'Visual Web.'

Gatterbauer, Wolfgang, Paul Bohunsky, Marcus Herzog, Bernhard Krupl and Bernhard Pollak. WWW 2007 (2007). Articles>Information Design>Web Design

Classifying Web Sites  

In this paper, we present a novel method for the classification of Web sites. This method exploits both structure and content of Web sites in order to discern their functionality. It allows for distinguishing between eight of the most relevant functional classes of Web sites. We show that a pre-classification of Web sites utilizing structural properties considerably improves a subsequent textual classification with standard techniques. We evaluate this approach on a dataset comprising more than 16,000 Web sites with about 20 million crawled and 100 million known Web pages. Our approach achieves an accuracy of 92% for the coarse-grained classification of these Web sites.

Lindemann, Christoph and Lars Littig. WWW 2007 (2007). Articles>Web Design>Information Design>Metadata

Building and Managing Personalized Semantic Portals  

This paper presents a semantic portal, SEMPort, which provides better user support with personalized views, semantic navigation, ontology-based search and three different kinds of semantic hyperlinks. Distributed content editing and provision is supplied for the maintenance of the contents in real-time. As a case study, SEMPort is tested on the Course Modules Web Page (CMWP) of the School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS).

Şah, M. and W. Hall. WWW 2007 (2007). Articles>Information Design>Web Design>Semantic

Tag Clouds for Summarizing Web Search Results  

In this paper, we describe an application, PubCloud that uses tag clouds for the summarization of results from queries over the PubMed database of biomedical literature. PubCloud responds to queries of this database with tag clouds generated from words extracted from the abstracts returned by the query. The results of a user study comparing the PubCloud tag-cloud summarization of query results with the standard result list provided by PubMed indicated that the tag cloud interface is advantageous in presenting descriptive information and in reducing user frustration but that it is less effective at the task of enabling users to discover relations between concepts.

Kuo, Byron Y-L., Thomas Hentrich, Benjamin M. Good and Mark D. Wilkinson. WWW 2007 (2007). Articles>Web Design>Information Design>Taxonomy

Toward Expressive Syndication on the Web  

Syndication systems on the Web have attracted vast amounts of attention in recent years. As technologies have emerged and matured, there has been a transition to more expressive syndication approaches; that is, subscribers and publishers are provided with more expressive means of describing their interests and published content, enabling more accurate information filtering. In this paper, we formalize a syndication architecture that utilizes expressive Web ontologies and logic-based reasoning for selective content dissemination. This provides finer grained control for filtering and automated reasoning for discovering implicit subscription matches, both of which are not achievable in less expressive approaches. We then address one of the main limitations with such a syndication approach, namely matching newly published information with subscription requests in an efficient and practical manner. To this end, we investigate continuous query answering for a large subset of the Web Ontology Language (OWL); specifically, we formally define continuous queries for OWL knowledge bases and present a novel algorithm for continuous query answering in a large subset of this language. Lastly, an evaluation of the query approach is shown, demonstrating its effectiveness for syndication purposes.

Halaschek-Wiener, C. and J. Hendler. WWW 2007 (2007). Articles>Web Design>Information Design>RSS

Consistency-Preserving Caching of Dynamic Database Content  

With the growing use of dynamic web content generated from relational databases, traditional caching solutions for throughput and latency improvements are ineffective. We describe a middleware layer called Ganesh that reduces the volume of data transmitted without semantic interpretation of queries or results. It achieves this reduction through the use of cryptographic hashing to detect similarities with previous results. These benefits do not require any compromise of the strict consistency semantics provided by the back-end database. Further, Ganesh does not require modifications to applications, web servers, or database servers, and works with closed-source applications and databases. Using two benchmarks representative of dynamic web sites, measurements of our prototype show that it can increase end-to-end throughput by as much as twofold for non-data intensive applications and by as much as tenfold for data intensive ones.

Tolia, Niraj and M. Satyanarayanan. WWW 2007 (2007). Articles>Web Design>Information Design>Databases

Web Object Retrieval  

The primary function of current Web search engines is essentially relevance ranking at the document level. However, myriad structured information about real-world objects is embedded in static Web pages and online Web databases. Document-level information retrieval can unfortunately lead to highly inaccurate relevance ranking in answering object-oriented queries. In this paper, we propose a paradigm shift to enable searching at the object level. In traditional information retrieval models, documents are taken as the retrieval units and the content of a document is considered reliable. However, this reliability assumption is no longer valid in the object retrieval context when multiple copies of information about the same object typically exist. These copies may be inconsistent because of diversity of Web site qualities and the limited performance of current information extraction techniques. If we simply combine the noisy and inaccurate attribute information extracted from different sources, we may not be able to achieve satisfactory retrieval performance. In this paper, we propose several language models for Web object retrieval, namely an unstructured object retrieval model, a structured object retrieval model, and a hybrid model with both structured and unstructured retrieval features. We test these models on a paper search engine and compare their performances. We conclude that the hybrid model is the superior by taking into account the extraction errors at varying levels.

Nie, Zaiqing, Yunxiao Ma, Shuming Shi, Ji-Rong Wen and Wei-Ying Ma. WWW 2007 (2007). Articles>Web Design>Information Design>Search

The Discoverability of the Web  

Previous studies have highlighted the high arrival rate of new content on the web. We study the extent to which this new content can be efficiently discovered by a crawler. Our study has two parts. First, we study the inherent difficulty of the discovery problem using a maximum cover formulation, under an assumption of perfect estimates of likely sources of links to new content. Second, we relax this assumption and study a more realistic setting in which algorithms must use historical statistics to estimate which pages are most likely to yield links to new content. We recommend a simple algorithm that performs comparably to all approaches we consider. We measure the overhead of discovering new content, de- fined as the average number of fetches required to discover one new page. We show first that with perfect foreknowledge of where to explore for links to new content, it is possible to discover 90% of all new content with under 3% overhead, and 100% of new content with 9% overhead. But actual algorithms, which do not have access to perfect foreknowl- edge, face a more difficult task: one quarter of new content is simply not amenable to efficient discovery. Of the re- maining three quarters, 80% of new content during a given week may be discovered with 160% overhead if content is recrawled fully on a monthly basis.

Dasgupta, Anirban, Arpita Ghosh, Ravi Kumar, Christopher Olston, Sandeep Pandey and Andrew Tomkins. WWW 2007 (2007). Articles>Web Design>Search>Information Design

Mega Drop-Down Navigation Menus Work Well

Given that regular drop-down menus are rife with usability problems, it takes a lot for me to recommend a new form of drop-down. But, as our testing videos show, mega drop-downs overcome the downsides of regular drop-downs. Thus, I can recommend one while warning against the other.

Nielsen, Jakob. Alertbox (2009). Articles>Web Design>Information Design>Usability

Bookmark (Anchor) Linking Tip

You can link to any tag within the page by quoting its ID. For example, if you have a paragraph with an ID of "intro", then you can link directly to that point without having to insert a bookmark.

Self, Tony. HyperWrite (2007). Articles>Web Design>Information Design>HTML

Online Design

A graduate seminar in the theory and practice of structuring and designing information for web-enabled devices. This course emphasizes web standards, accessibility, and rapid prototyping.

Stolley, Karl. Illinois Institute of Technology (2009). Academic>Courses>Web Design>Information Design

Top-Ten Information Architecture (IA) Mistakes

Structure and navigation must support each other and integrate with search and across subsites. Complexity, inconsistency, hidden options, and clumsy UI mechanics prevent users from finding what they need.

Nielsen, Jakob. Alertbox (2009). Articles>Web Design>Information Design>User Interface

Here Be Content

I have always liked the idea of medieval mapmakers using the phrase "Here Be Dragons" to denote unexplored or dangerous territories. Sticking a fire-breathing reptile in documentation when you run out of facts? That’s panache. These days, people aren’t so stylish. When an information architect (or user experience designer) doesn’t have the time (or the talent) to document content requirements, they stick a "page stack" on their site map.

Rach, Melissa. Brain Traffic (2009). Articles>Web Design>Information Design>Sitemaps

Designing for Faceted Search

Faceted search, or guided navigation, has become the de facto standard for e-commerce and product-related websites, from big box stores to product review sites. But e-commerce sites aren’t the only ones joining the facets club. Other content-heavy sites such as media publishers (e.g. Financial Times: ft.com), libraries (e.g. NCSU Libraries: lib.ncsu.edu/), and even non-profits (e.g. Urban Land Institute: uli.org) are tapping into faceted search to make their often broad-range of content more findable. Essentially, faceted search has become so ubiquitous that users are not only getting used to it, they are coming to expect it.

Lemieux, Stephanie. User Interface Engineering (2009). Articles>Web Design>Information Design>Search

Introduction to RDFa

The web is designed to be consumed by humans, and much of the rich, useful information our websites contain, is inaccessible to machines. People can cope with all sorts of variations in layout, spelling, capitalization, color, position, and so on, and still absorb the intended meaning from the page. Machines, on the other hand, need some help. A new kind of web—a semantic web—would be made up of information marked up in such a way that software can also easily understand it. Before considering how we might achieve such a web, let’s look at what we might be able to do with it.

Birbeck, Mark. List Apart, A (2009). Articles>Web Design>Information Design>Metadata

Indexing the Web—It’s Not Just Google’s Business

Web databases do much more than passively store information. Part of their power comes from indexing records efficiently. An index serves as a map, identifying the precise location of a small piece of data in a much larger pile. For example, when I search for “web development,” Google identifies two hundred million results and displays the first ten—in a quarter of a second. But Google isn’t loading every one of those pages and scanning their contents when I perform my search: they’ve analyzed the pages ahead of time and matched my search terms against an index that only references the original content.

Mullican, Lyle. List Apart, A (2009). Articles>Web Design>Information Design>Search Engine Optimization

Is Your Key Content Drowning in News?

Many web editors spend a lot of their time writing news stories for the company web site. However, traffic analysis frequently reveals that this content is not very popular - and that users may in fact miss the key content they come to find (product data, addresses etc.) because it's practically drowning in news stories.

Furu, Nina. Content Strategy (2005). Articles>Web Design>Information Design>Search Engine Optimization