Information Architecture
Why is it important?
The World Wide Web has revolutionised and generalised a previously little exploited concept, that of the hyperlink, the possibility of relating otherwise unconnected content, irrespective of structure, flow, source or - thanks to the Internet - physical location.The wondrous simplicity of Web hyperlinks has a serious downside for information and content managers: link rot. On the surface, the hyperlink acts as a magic transporter to another location. The link description, that is seen and clicked on, is the cue to clients as to what they can expect to find. Because the target of the hyperlink can be located anywhere and called anything, that's often precisely what happens: anywhere and anything.
I have lost count of the number of times I have seen collections of web pages build up with no filenaming or storage conventions or, at best, one known only to the original developer. More recently, the large majority of reasonable web 'container management' systems will take charge of these problems but deploy either a proprietary naming and organising convention over which the developer has very little real control, or requiring considerable configuration, itself presupposing a coherent - read 'well thought out' - policy established beforehand.
Example of "link rot"
'Link rot' is the phenomenon that has gone hand in hand with such lack of container management: as a developer loses track of the references and pointers that an increasingly complex mesh of hyperlinks creates, the dangers of one of one or many of such links going 'bad' thus increases.One answer to this, which I address in my book, is to ensure a coherent naming convention for all your content 'chunks' and that can be applied irrespectively to paper or electronic content. Further, it must be robust enough to survive changes of output format without disruption.
There is nothing more frustrating for the end user than to see diligently bookmarked pages resulting in a series of 'Web page not found' errors simply because the ".htm" extensions had been replaced throughout by, for example, ".php".
This is but one concrete example of the sort of long term implications that flow from a lack of information architecture. However, a similar lack of clear naming conventions and data definitions in an enterprise are the single biggest problem in getting information systems to "talk" to each other: in the US car industry alone, it is estimated that more than a billion US dollars is devoted to repairing or re-entering data files that cannot be used in different suppliers' information systems.
As with building architecture, it is far better to spend the extra time on the drawing board with blueprints, than trying to repair problems after the building is finished...This message still seems to be unheard by the "quick and dirty" brigade of programmers and developers who only concern themselves with immediate goals of a particular project.