Get thee to an information architect
At a work meeting yesterday, I was told of this site, which was held up as an Object of Scorn. Whatever the other folks attending the meeting want (and that’s still up in the air), it’s Not That.
Looking at the site this morning, I saw why. It’s not that the content is bad; the content seems excellent. What’s bad? The total lack of information architecture.
The organization is bad. The navigation is bad. The search is bad (this site is crying out for fielded limit searching). The visual design is bad. The labelling is beyond abysmal. I would never send anyone here to find a resource; it’d be like asking them to find a specific snowflake in an avalanche. Honestly, I didn’t think professional sites with information architecture this bad still existed.
Hints of better site structure peek out from the piled-high badness avalanche; the “virtual bookshelves” aren’t a bad notion at all. But the whole is just bad, bad, bad, so bad I can’t even start taking it apart because I’m not sure what to rant about first.
Moral of the story: Spend some grant money on an information architect (or a librarian! or a librarian information architect!) in addition to your JSP coders, won’t you? Your users will bless you for it, and your competitors will have one less way to cut you out of the picture.