Tag: Information Architecture

Site Clean-Up Update and Organization to Surface Information Better

Anthropomorphic cat computer technician standing in front of a vintage mainframe computer. Image created with Stable Diffusion.

As I wrote about two weeks ago, I realized that the blog side of dynamicsubspace.net needed a serious cleaning to improve its information architecture. There were numerous posts with dead links as well as removed video and images that erased the context and purpose of the page. There were posts lacking relevance to what I wanted to use the site for. There were posts that had not received any views in over 10 years. And there was the issue of my poorly thought out categories and the related issue of tag proliferation.

Since that post, I’ve whittled the categories down to 28 from 30, slashed the tags to 187 from 1,300, and removed 234 posts from just over 1,600 (making yesterday’s post the new post number 1,400). Also, I searched for posts by keywords and re-applied Categories and Tags to help relevant information surface easier through the Categories and Tag clouds in the right sidebar and the relevant posts shared at the bottom of each post (when you click through the title or land on a page through a search engine).

These principles that I’ve learned should apply to any personal website:

  • When initially developing your site, take the time to write up a plan that includes its purpose and goals, a list of categories that encompass the kinds of writing that support your your site’s purpose and goals, and a list of possible tags that give granular detail to your categories (knowing these will increase over time).
  • Review your posts manually and using tools like Google Search Console to search for deadwood, such as posts with dead links, out of date or irrelevant information, removed embedded content hosted elsewhere, etc. If those posts are cross-linked on other posts or pages, you will need to track those down and remove the links.
  • Review your posts’ Categories and Tags. If your Categories change, they might need to be reapplied to some posts. And with your tags, new tags that have relevance to older content should be applied to help build connections and surface that content for your visitors.
  • Don’t be afraid to delete. It’s your site, so you get to make the executive decisions about what the site should offer your audience. Old, outdated, broken, and no longer useful information might be choking your audience’s access to the information that your site is providing.
  • If you keep your site’s posts relevant and labelled appropriately, you can help your visitors discover the information they are looking for that you provide.

Cleaning Up the Site

Anthropomorphic cat technician working in a cyberpunk computer server room. Created with Stable Diffusion.

I registered DynamicSubspace.net in 2007, but I imported content that I had begun writing in 2006. That means that the site’s content has been growing for about 17 years. I’ve written over 700,000 words across over 1,600 posts, which doesn’t include the pages with bibliographies and other information. The posts were categorized in over 30 categories and 1,300 tags.

Watching the steady decline of site views since the high water mark of 2012 with 91,526 views, I knew that I needed to dig into the site and improve findability of the content for visitors once they land on the site usually from Google and other search engines. The idea behind this is that I have lots of overlapping and related content that might be useful for some visitors. While a search engine points a visitor to one particular post, the visitor might not realize there is related content that they might find useful. So, I want to help surface some of that other info and help visitors use navigation tools built into the site to help them find related content on their own.

The easiest change that I made to my WordPress settings was to enable “Show related content after posts,” which automagically give three related post previews at the bottom of a post’s page and show how it might be related (e.g., via the same category or tag).

The heavier lifts involved sorting tags by how many posts use them, identifying adjacent/overlapping tags, and consolidating those tags across affected posts. This less granular approach to tags makes it easier to find related content and it significantly reduced how many tags my site uses now. It’s more logical and less scattershot. I got the tags down to only 177. The tags appearing on the most posts are listed on the right in the tag cloud widget.

Similarly, I reduced the number of categories and made sure posts were assigned the appropriate ones. There are now 31 categories. All of these categories are listed on in the category cloud on the left–the size of each is determined by the number of posts categorized each way. I haven’t completed this for categories and tags, but it is something that I can work at over time–improving content associations over time.

Another problem identified with the help of Google Search Console was the number of pages that it wouldn’t index due to having dead video links–dead links to YouTube content. This required a little more work to hunt down those pages, but I deleted the dead links and added an update on those pages that the content either no longer existed or was removed due to copyright issues.

While I was digging through those pages with dead video links, it made me reconsider keeping all posts as some of those posts were only links to videos/embedded video. I decided to delete those pages that were only video-focused without any commentary or very little commentary on my part.

Also, I began thinking about posts for long defunct call for papers and application notifications. When I originally started my blog, I envisioned it being a hub for SF Studies info, but it was impractical for me to attempt to keep up and share out CFPs and announcements. It was hard enough posting about the work that I was doing while doing everything else–studying, teaching, working, etc. Since I didn’t reach the level of re-sharing that I had hoped to but there was a significant amount of this kind of content, I decided to delete those posts as they weren’t strongly related to my work and there’s no requirement on the part of my blog to be a historical record of those things. Furthermore, the less relevant posts won’t accidentally surface as a related post on the content that I actually want to help visitors find. Between the defunct video posts and CFPs/announcements, I culled 79 posts leaving 1,543.

One thing that I’m opting not to do is re-enable comments. While I allowing visitors an option to comment on posts and pages to build engagement, it has in my experience been more focused on criticism, negativity, and spam. I give my email in the about widget on the right, so folks are free to contact me that way. Since I instituted that years ago, I can count the number of emails that I’ve received from visitors on one hand, so it seems to be a high enough bar that saves me from dealing with comments that I don’t want to police. Also, it keeps the site focused on the content that I want to publish.

I’ll keep working to improve the overall operation of the site so that it has as much utility for its visitors.