The key to organising website articles begins with schematising your content. If you are an established news organisation or an information service, the first impulse is to group your content according to the production unit. For a newspaper, this would be something like:
Business, Sport, Human Interest, Local News, State News, National News, International News.
If you are an organisation like UNESCO, your principle groups are:
Social and Human Sciences, Culture, Education, Information, Natural Science.
This if fine when your content falls neatly into the boundaries of one of these groupings. But content often doesn’t always fall neatly within the bounds of primary categorisation. Content often belongs to several categories, not just one. What happens when sport and politics and business collide? Or what about a study of education and information technology across cultures. Where do we put that information now? How do we arrive at a definitive classification?
The fun thing about digital information is that we can dispense with singular classification, and allow information to exist under several classifications at once. A database designer might say this is an example of a one-to-many relationship. The point is, from the beginnings of building a service, we should start thinking about multiple approaches to arriving at a single article, or if you want an analogy, there are many roads we can take to reach a single destination.
So, when you set up an information service (and I would venture that “Building a website” falls within the description of information service), it pays to think about where information resides in a schematic context from the perspective of the article reader, the user, the visitor – Who they are, where are the coming from, what they are searching for and how they are searching for it.
Lets not define website structure according to what’s nice for the author. Rather, “Let’s identify our readership, and let’s consider how they want to find their information”. Because when it comes to information, it’s the reader who seeks it, who finds it, who acquires it, who consumes it, saves it and maybe even redistributes it. These are all the qualities of property, these are acts of possession. Let’s make it easier for the reader to get your stuff.