ABSTRACT
Each new Nielsen Alertbox article seems to set off a round of discussion on web page navigation on the Internet discussion lists about interface design and information design, yet Nielsen writes with a very strong navigational focus. Likewise in the discussions I participate in on the SIGIA-L discussion list and books such as Information Architecture for the World Wide Web (Rosenfeld & Morville, 1998). In the end, there seem to be many guidelines for navigation and content categorizing and few guidelines for actual content. From a somewhat cynical viewpoint, it seems most of the literature looks at content as shown in figure 7.1. A disconnect seems to exist between the need to actually communicate information and the methods of arranging all the information for a web site. The literature discusses how to create links, general page design, and how people use hypertext systems, but not how to determine what information to present. Most methods assume the actual information already exists, or it refers designers to task or user analysis to determine the information needs, effectively sidestepping the primary question of what or how information is required by the reader.
