1What is online journalism? - Ayo Menulis FISIP UAJY

186 Journalism Online
The top-down approach allows you to quickly get a handle on
the scope of the web site without going through an extensive
content inventory process. You can begin identifying the
major content areas and exploring possible organization
schemes that will provide access to the content.
A hierarchy can be your starting point, but it does not have to be
your end point. Most web sites are based on hierarchies but, as we
will see, there are alternative site structures.
Next, you should start to put your content into groups/
categories/sections. This is where a lot of sites go wrong and can
be your first point of departure with your users, even before you
have actually gathered any material or filled a single page. You
must put yourself in your users’ shoes and ask the following
questions.
What will interest the users most? If this sounds familiar, it is. It is
the essential canon that informed and guided our news
gathering and writing in earlier chapters. This is why content
organization can be a seamless extension of your journalism.
This may sound obvious, but some sites do not appear to give it
much thought, perhaps because they do not give the content
providers enough say in designing their information
architecture.
How will the users want/expect this information to be grouped/
arranged? This is perhaps the most difficult area. Corporate sites
in particular can suffer from assuming too much user knowledge
of their organization. The providers of the information who
spend each working day immersed in the structural intricacies of
their organizations, find it very difficult to distance themselves,
to put themselves on the outside looking in. User testing here is
essential at the prototype stage.
What are the tasks the users will want to perform? Will they
know exactly what they are looking for or will they want to
browse? Do they want summaries or print-offs?
Understanding if your user is likely to know what they’re looking
for is a major consideration when organizing your content. With