I could have entitled this blog “Information Architecture: How to Use Labels”; though that title would have been more direct, it wouldn’t have made you do my bidding, i.e.: click on the headline and read what I have to say.
In other words, you reading this proves that I picked an appropriate label for the link that led you here.
Information Architecture, what’s that?
Information Architecture is all about arranging and categorizing information in a way that makes it accessible to a seeker. Librarians have been doing it since the beginning of written catalogs. Web designers do it, too, but perhaps not quite so consciously.
The Internet is a task-oriented medium filled with structured information. Whatever your website’s purpose, you expect your visitors to do something. Ultimately, you want your visitors to easily find what they are looking for, or possibly be alerted of new information.
Take this blog for example. My goal (or bidding, as it were) was to inform you of the knowledge I am sharing. To reach my goal, I needed to promote a link. That link’s text is a label, and because hyperlinks are the glue that holds the Internet’s structure together, how I chose to identify the linked page on the linking page was important.
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