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> >	A review of Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, 3rd edition By Peter Morville and Louis Rosenfeld Published by O'Reilly Price $39.99 Reviewed by LeeMcKusick Information architecture is the process of creating a framework and system of tags, labels and pages that transport a user of your website to the information the user seeks. It is not graphic design and it is much more than either a table of contents or a search function. "Architecture" suggests that it is a thing built and presented to web site users as a kind of mental building. Focus is on medium and large website architecture projects Information Architecture for the World Wide Web (IAforWWW) is a guide to the the task of creating an information architecture. The specific focus of this book is for medium and large website architecture projects. The book I review here is the 2006 "third edition". I bought a copy of the first edition of this book in 1998 as I built my first website with Perl, Apache and Netscape. Eight years has brought a huge expansion of the Internet and a dramatic growth in the sophistication of web site design and structure. IAforWWW has grown too: The book is 2.5 times larger than the first edition. The scale of websites contemplated is huge: One case study is for a website with 3.1 million pages hosted on 8,000 servers. An IA Team Manager Would Use this Book A big change is the third edition is written for an information architecture team manager. The team manager would use this book to profile the desirable team members. For each team member, the manager would use this book to model the intellectual deliverables needed to build an effective information architecture for the specific web site in question. The strength of this book is it provides 21 chapters and numerous mini-essays parsing aspects of the information architecture tasks. The finished product of an information architecture is web pages that speak to several different user audiences. The work is to find and organize more than one kind of tag and labeling system and to communicate with each of the audiences in a natural manner that immediately leads the person to what they seek. A big blast of details and it is hard to find guidance for small projects The weakness of this book is it does not speak to the sole practitioner that needs a simple, elegant and enjoyable work concept to create a modest information architecture for a relatively small web site. I bought the first edition of this book because I knew I needed an information architecture strategy. The third edition no longer addresses directly the self-educating small player in web development. If you are a small scale or self educated web developer you have to read this book with a bullet-proof vest over your ego. There is a section titled "Who's qualified to practice information architecture" [sic]. The career requirements are tightening up faster than I can upgrade my resume. Information Architecture for Small scale web projects What I miss from this book is information architecture organized as a task that might be done by a single web site builder as an artist. Where this book is like a gushing fire hose of many urgent details, I want a straightforward narrative, a flow, milestones, subtasks with iteration, a way to progressively inform the site drafts as I pull in more understanding of my user's semantic world. Guide to Open Source Information Architecture Tools is needed Also absent from IAforWWW is there is no mention of open source information architecture tools. The implementation side of information architecture is still HTML lists, forms, tables and headers. More elaborate structures available for reuse include breadcrumb trails, search modules, metadata flagging systems, and user activity trail logs. For the open source software community, the thing needed is the names of modules to review for refining your own site's information architecture. Modules relevant for information architecture exist but are scattered through the Perl, Python and Ruby programming environments. -- LeeMcKusick - 23 Dec 2006

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A review of Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, 3rd edition

By Peter Morville and Louis Rosenfeld Published by O'Reilly Price $39.99 Reviewed by LeeMcKusick

Information architecture is the process of creating a framework and system of tags, labels and pages that transport a user of your website to the information the user seeks. It is not graphic design and it is much more than either a table of contents or a search function. "Architecture" suggests that it is a thing built and presented to web site users as a kind of mental building.

Focus is on medium and large website architecture projects

Information Architecture for the World Wide Web (IAforWWW) is a guide to the the task of creating an information architecture. The specific focus of this book is for medium and large website architecture projects.

The book I review here is the 2006 "third edition". I bought a copy of the first edition of this book in 1998 as I built my first website with Perl, Apache and Netscape.

Eight years has brought a huge expansion of the Internet and a dramatic growth in the sophistication of web site design and structure. IAforWWW has grown too: The book is 2.5 times larger than the first edition. The scale of websites contemplated is huge: One case study is for a website with 3.1 million pages hosted on 8,000 servers.

An IA Team Manager Would Use this Book

A big change is the third edition is written for an information architecture team manager. The team manager would use this book to profile the desirable team members. For each team member, the manager would use this book to model the intellectual deliverables needed to build an effective information architecture for the specific web site in question.

The strength of this book is it provides 21 chapters and numerous mini-essays parsing aspects of the information architecture tasks. The finished product of an information architecture is web pages that speak to several different user audiences. The work is to find and organize more than one kind of tag and labeling system and to communicate with each of the audiences in a natural manner that immediately leads the person to what they seek.

A big blast of details and it is hard to find guidance for small projects

The weakness of this book is it does not speak to the sole practitioner that needs a simple, elegant and enjoyable work concept to create a modest information architecture for a relatively small web site. I bought the first edition of this book because I knew I needed an information architecture strategy. The third edition no longer addresses directly the self-educating small player in web development.

If you are a small scale or self educated web developer you have to read this book with a bullet-proof vest over your ego. There is a section titled "Who's qualified to practice information architecture" [sic]. The career requirements are tightening up faster than I can upgrade my resume.

Information Architecture for Small scale web projects

What I miss from this book is information architecture organized as a task that might be done by a single web site builder as an artist.

Where this book is like a gushing fire hose of many urgent details, I want a straightforward narrative, a flow, milestones, subtasks with iteration, a way to progressively inform the site drafts as I pull in more understanding of my user's semantic world.

Guide to Open Source Information Architecture Tools is needed

Also absent from IAforWWW is there is no mention of open source information architecture tools. The implementation side of information architecture is still HTML lists, forms, tables and headers. More elaborate structures available for reuse include breadcrumb trails, search modules, metadata flagging systems, and user activity trail logs.

For the open source software community, the thing needed is the names of modules to review for refining your own site's information architecture. Modules relevant for information architecture exist but are scattered through the Perl, Python and Ruby programming environments.

-- LeeMcKusick - 23 Dec 2006

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