Well, I'd be interested to hear the opinion of others since I'm doing the same thing as you right now and sometimes I wonder if there's a better way to do it. I was thinking about writing something on this for my site but I'll tell you the story here.
It's important to remember that navigation is not the same as a content structure because the former often looks different to the latter. I have about 2000 units of content to remodel and since this is a policy/publishing environment, the decisionmaking process is especially involved! Firstly we hammered out labels for the new themes and categories to be used using a card sorting exercise. One task after that has been to migrate existing content over to the new structure, which sounds similar to what you're doing. We had some page crawler software (no idea what that was, sorry) create an Excel spreadsheet which I converted to a flat XML file. Using a web page interface that I wrote (it uses a Javascript library to enable drag-and-drop functionality), I drag and drop each unit into the correct section and flag it with a fixed set of options including things like [REDISTRIBUTE], [DELETE], [DISCUSS]. Then I sort the results to create a report which can be put in front of the business. Thx, Mike -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Alinta Thornton Sent: 27 November 2008 03:19 To: IxDA Subject: [IxDA Discuss] Menu IA tools I'm wondering what tools people use to create large scale menu structures. For instance, if you were asked to work with a hierarchical menu for a 10000 page site, how would you manipulate the menu? Currently, I use Word's outlining feature, which lets me see structure easily, expand and contract categories, promote and demote, and so on. I use a style called "Note" to write notes to myself about a particular section or item, which I can later delete or keep to show in the documentation later. To create pages I either type them in myself (sigh) or (brightens!) import them after creating a sitemap list with a spider or client sitemap. Does anyone have something better? I've seen people working in Excel but I find that clunky. Axure has a sitemapping tool which seems to be more about linking to pages inside Axure, ditto Visio. Intuitect has something but I'm not familiar with it, and it seemed when I looked at the demo that you couldn't export it out afterwards or import pages in, forcing you to create each one yourself. Alinta Thornton User Experience Lead independent digital media web publishing | marketing+technology services | publisher solutions Westside, Level 2 Suite C, 83 O'Riordan Street, Alexandria NSW Australia 2015 PO Box 7160, Alexandria, NSW 2015 W www.idmco.com.au B http://eezia.blogspot.com ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help No virus found in this incoming message. Checked by AVG - http://www.avg.com Version: 8.0.175 / Virus Database: 270.9.10/1811 - Release Date: 25/11/2008 8:29 ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
