Fixing the information architecture of my site

Last month, in What’s wrong with my site, I picked three small improvements and assigned them each to a different “Future Shane”.

fix the Information Architecture (IA) of this site. If someone comes to ShaneG.ca and reads an interesting article, it’s difficult for them to explore. That’s a problem because there’s over fifty great articles that they might like.

June Shane, June 2019

So I (July Shane) got out the sticky notes and tried to make sense of the content of this site.

Step 1: Write all titles on sticky notes

One sticky note per post, arranged by date

As I was writing the title of each post onto a sticky note, I put them up on the wall in chronological order. It was very pleasing to see that I have had no months without a post in over 2.5 years.

One sticky note per post, arranged by gravity

What wasn’t pleasing was when half my sticky notes fell onto the floor.

I think many years ago they came out with Super Sticky notes which seems like a complete contradiction of the value proposition but I think it’s just an acknowledgement that the original formulation fell off more than we’d like. I don’t think of them as Super Sticky, just the proper amount of sticky for most uses.

Steve Portigal, Dollars to Donuts podcast

Next time, I’ll get the Super Sticky notes.

Step 2: Arrange by topic

I then moved all of my sticky notes to the floor so that gravity could work for me instead of against me. I grouped the blog posts by topic and tried to give meaningful names to each group.

Grouped and labeled sticky notes; this time on the floor

Step 3: Implement

After a couple more iterations, here’s what I came up with.

My new menu

For comparison, here’s the old one.

My old menu

I still don’t love it but it way better represents what I write about most. It also is simple enough to fit into a top-level menu instead of a hamburger menu, which I’m sure August Shane will appreciate.