1What is online journalism? - Ayo Menulis FISIP UAJY

188 Journalism Online
time. The more expert the people become, the more an
information space should adapt to give them the power tools
they need.
Putting the content sections into a structure
By now, you are beginning to formulate the basic structure to your
site. You may not have followed Rosenfeld and Morville’s
suggestion about roughing out your content with a basic
hierarchy, but you will still find yourself drawing boxes connected
by lines, indicating how they relate to each other. Each line will
represent a link from one page/area to another. Your list is
turning into a flow diagram.
Next, a good tip from Robin Williams and John Tollett (2000).
As your ideas come together, they are bound to change. So
rather than sitting knee-deep in crumpled balls of paper, grab
the pad of sticky-backed reminder notes and devote each one to
a separate area of content. Then get a large sheet of white paper,
or even a whiteboard, and move the stickies around to try out
different structures and relationships between content. At this
stage, each stickie might represent a separate content area or
sub-area, but as your ideas mature (and if your board is big
enough), each could come to represent an individual web
page.
So you are now surrounded by sticky notes and a more
detailed flow diagram is emerging. What shape should it be? As
we have noted, the instinct is to place categories and pages in a
hierarchy, like a family tree, with your home page at the top.
That is one of the most common web site structures, but it is not
the only one.
Lynch and Horton (1999) give a breakdown of the four different
types of site structures.
1 The sequence – this places pages in a line with the only link
available supporting the linear path from A to B to C. This
sounds like a contradiction of the medium with its non-linear
consumption pattern. However, it is a useful method for