Shirley Kaiser has an excellent post that pointed me back to a most wonderful article from 1998. A Standard for Site Organization.
This article, by Greg Knauss, outlines an ideal root-level directory structure. His presented ideal is one that I've followed for years, and works. (well, not completely, but for the most part.)
/about/, /help/, /archive/, /search/, /search/ and /contact/ I all agree with completely. These are no-brainers in my view. And if all sites had these directories, it would be so much easier to surf.
/new/, /download/, /legal/ and /text/ are one's that I disagree with.
/new/ is too close to /news/, and for corporate sites, /news/ is a must-have. Plus, I feel that any new items should be highlighted on the front page.
/download/ isn't always appropriate. I guess it could be a directory. I'm neutral on this one.
/legal/ could be replaced with /privacy/ in my mind.
/text/ isn't viable. You should be able to get text-only versions of the site on the fly via CSS. But this could be a viable directory if you had an auto-generator.
The whole article is excellent. It covers a lot of good ground outlining some basic structure and thoughts that are applicable today. And some best practices are always a good thing.
Tagged As Info Architecture, Strategy
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Posted at 10:36 AM