How To Use This Book (Information Architecture for the World Wide Web)

0.3. How To Use This Book

This is not the typical O'Reilly animal book that tells you how to build a Unix firewall machine from a box of toothpicks and an old coffee maker. There are no code listings, no listings of function parameters, and no workarounds on little-known bugs in SunOS 4.1.4. While the content may be different, the format of this book is much the same: first we tell you why you need to know something, then we tell you what you need to know, and then we show you how to put it to practical use.

Here is a description of the contents:

Chapter 1, "What Makes a Web Site Work", forces you to walk in the shoes of site users, ensuring that you'll consider their needs as you design the architecture.

Chapter 2, "Introduction to Information Architecture", provides you with some context for the field, and describes the information architect's role in developing web sites.

Chapter 3, "Organizing Information", describes options for building organization structures, the backbones of any site, and organization schemes that meet the needs of your site's various audiences.

Chapter 4, "Designing Navigation Systems", helps you to choose from among the various ways that you can make your site browsable.

Chapter 5, "Labeling Systems", provides you with approaches to determining and creating effective and descriptive content labels that your site's users will understand.

Chapter 6, "Searching Systems", helps you to understand how people really search, and describes indexing and search interface improvements that result in better searching performance.

Chapter 7, "Research", makes sure you're prepared to move forward by helping you to learn about the site's mission and vision, budget, timeline, audiences, content, and functionality.

Chapter 8, "Conceptual Design", provides you with the tools and approaches you need to capture the ideas that will drive the information architecture.

Chapter 9, "Production and Operations", describes how you and your blueprints will affect and guide the production of the site.

Chapter 10, "Information Architecture in Action", is a case study that demonstrates the evolution of an information architecture for a real client.

While this book stands on its own, we also encourage you to learn more about the disciplines from which information architecture borrows many of its principles. In the Chapter 11, "Selected Bibliography"Chapter 11, "Selected Bibliography"Selected Bibliography, Chapter 11, "Selected Bibliography"we've listed several publications that might be interesting to you as further reading.