The importance of authoring in IA
Categorised under: Content management, Information architecture
Donna Maurer has written a blog entry about how important the authoring tool is in meeting the information architecture needs of a site. To quote:
But (and there has to be a but) – for ease of authoring the system needed to allow authors to create a page and have it appear in the appropriate place automatically, rather than having them edit three different pages to create links. At first I figured that authors could identify in metadata where the content should appear. Then I thought again – with a bunch of distributed, non-technical authors, it would be hard enough getting the content placed in one sensible place, and certainly not three. So, I eventually made a decision to store the content in one primary place, and have an administrator create some sensible cross linking. This of course compromised some of the clever things that I had designed in the information architecture. But there is no point having the clever things if the content is never going to be authored well.
James Robertson is the Managing Director of 