Information Management using the Web

Contents

• Information Objects
• Your Web Site as a Publication Medium
• Analyzing your Communication Needs
• Organizing Information Objects
• Converting to Object-Oriented Publication

• Organizing Information
• Prioritize your Information Objects
• Create a Site Map
• Consider Multiple Views
• Reality-Check your Plans

Your Web Site 
as a Publication Medium

Every organization is a hotbed information. People develop or discover information, and other people need access to that information, both inside the organization and out. 

One very helpful way to look at information is to analyze it into information objects. I learned this perspective working with Steven W. Peterson, of Peterson Williams Bizer, Inc., an Ann Arbor-based public relations firm. His campany has designed Web sites for a great many organizations. 

Analyzing your Communication Needs

This figure is an illustration of an organization's information objects and the way they might be handled:

Organizing Information Objects

In each case, someone is responsible for gathering the information into some kind of temporary holding-place - the "Info Objects" in the middle row. It might be a file folder of product offerings, pencil notes on a calendar, or a computer document representing an article or notice. 

The information then needs to get out to people: that's the "Publication" phase in the lowest row. Information might go out in a weekly bulletin, a monthly newsletter, a newspaper ad, a catalog, or by phone as people call in with questions. 

The point of looking at information this way is to help the organization identify each information object and decide: 

• Which publication media (one or several) to make it available in;
• how best to store information objects so they can be published in more than one medium;
• who is responsible at each stage for each information object or medium of publication.

We need to deal with the fact that each publication medium, to look its best, must have its own formatting and layout. You can't make effective newletters that look like fliers, and you can't make effective Web pages that look much like either. Each has its own best look and feel. 

For example, if an antique dealer has information about a collection of 19th century frontier lamps, they might want to mail detailed fliers to selected customers, include a summary in the monthly newsletter, and put both on the Web site. But it would be a waste of time to type each separately. Instead, the summary and details can both be typed into a simple text file and saved on the computer. When the flier is made up, all the text can be easily imported into a page layout program such as Pagemaker or Quark, where it would be formatted as a flier. The summary alone can be copied and pasted into the newsletter layout using another format. And finally, the summary and details could be put into a Web page using an HTML editor. 

Storing Text Objects

One step up from plain text is to use a common word processing program with "styles," such as Microsoft Word, so long as everybody agrees to use only a few designated styles. (See module W34c for information about converting MS Word to HTML.) This allows the authors of information to express the relative importance of various headings, but makes conversion to other formats relatively easy. 

Storing Pictures

This leads to a dilemma: should we keep pictures in big files that preserve all the detail, or use the more compressed formats that lose some detail? 

The best rule is to store photographs in the most detailed format you have space for. On Windows computers, BMP is a good choice; or Macintosh, TIFF works well. 

Both these formats preserve good color and detail, but neither are acceptable on the Web: they are bulky and take lots of disk space. On the Web, three formats are recognized by the newer browsers: GIF, JPEG, and PNG. See module W47h for more information about Web graphics. 
 

Prioritize your Information Objects

Prioritize them: decide which are most important for your audience to see first. 
 

Create a Site Map

An outline is often quicker to produce and easier to enter on the computer. But a diagram lets you easily capture the flexibility of the Web! 

For examples of site maps, look about halfway down in CoNDUIT: Toward the Virtual Classroom. 
 

Consider Multiple Views

The beauty of the web concept is that you can present information to people in many ways. They can follow their own trails and meet their own needs - as long as the designer anticipates those needs! 

Think about the different types of audience you expect to use your Web site: how can you lead each type deeper into your Web?(!) You might present each group with separate pages, or you might present each with the same information, but in a different order. The creative possibilities are endless! 
 

Reality-Check your Plans

• Who will do most of the work?
• How long will it take?
• Can you implement part of your site, and still have it be meaningful?
• Do you have the skills and the tools you need - or can you get them in a reasonable time?

Audience:

Objectives:

1. Describe an organization's information content in object-oriented terms;
2. Identify the originators of information in an organization;
3. Describe ways of storing information in interchangeable, common formats;
4. List several ways an organization's public information can be publicized.

Module W58c:

Author:

Institution: