An introduction to the Naace website for visitors and contributors

Finding what you want

After many years of producing websites for its clients, Dial Solutions have come to realise that the traditional way of organising information on websites is not the best way! The problem with websites containing articles on a range of subjects is how to organise them so that they can easily be found. The Dial Solutions CMS, supplied for Naace means that you can always find what you want!

Google does a very good job of this on a grand scale and makes it easy to find things by entering a text search, however this is only part of the problem. Visitors to websites expect to be able to click around and browse what is available and to home in or 'drill down' to a particular area of interest.

The traditional technique of organising Articles in a hierarchy can work well for a limited number of Articles and categories, but once the number of Articles and categories becomes large, then it can become difficult to navigate eg a website author may place a particular Article at:
curriculumplanning>history>primary
but a visitor might expect to find this Article in:
primary>curriculumplanning>history
If the visitor's mental map of the hierarchy does not match the author's, then Articles can be difficult to find.

To avoid this problem, the Naace CMS stores all Articles in a flat structure whereby each Article is apparently at the top level. There is a series of checkboxes to classify each Article as being relevant to a certain set of criteria. The CMS then generates every possible hierarchy to present the information to visitors.

Taking the above example, if the website author creates an Article about the history scheme of work and classifies it as being relevant to 'primary', 'curriculum planning' and 'history' (by ticking the checkboxes on a web input form), a user will be able to find the document in a number of places, including:
curriculumplanning>history>primary
curriculumplanning>primary>history
primary>curriculumplanning>history
history>primary

As well as presenting a menu-like approach to accessing this information, the Naace CMS also maps these multiple hierarchies onto the file system, so that when looking at Articles 'curriculum planning>history>primary', the URL will be
http://www.naace.co.uk/curriculumplanning/history/primary

Furthermore, the system also copes with 'intelligent guesses' in URLs eg if a visitor types in http://www.naace.co.uk/curriculumplanning/history/primary/tudors and 'tudors' is not one of the defined classifications for the site, the Naace CMS will do a search for all Articles classified as being related to 'primary', 'curriculum planning' and 'history' which mention the word 'tudors'.

At each location in this virtual hierarchy, the Naace CMS presents a list of Articles which match the classifications chosen, ranked by popularity. Thus, the Articles which most visitors want to see automatically 'bubble' to the top.

As the visitor moves through the hierarchy, a breadcrumb trail is displayed showing the path the visitor took to arrive at the current location, and allowing the visitor to backtrack to any previous step in the trail.

Whilst this is all great for the visitor wanting to find information on the site, the site's Authors still need to be able to influence what the visitors see at particular locations on the website.

Lead and Featured Articles

The Lead Article feature provides that influence. Any Article within the system can be specified as the lead Article at a particular location eg Authors/Contributors can create an Article about primary history and by ticking the 'primary' and 'history' boxes within the Lead Article system, they ensure that that Article appears under history>primary as well as primary>history.

In a similar way, the Featured Article system allows Authors to select Articles to be featured at various locations in the virtual hierarchy. Featured Articles are displayed as summaries in a small box on the right-hand side.

Easy to find: Article, Journal or collection

Each Article in the system has its own unique and persistent reference number and the Article can always be accessed or referred to using that reference number in the URL. This is shown in the summary box at the end of each Article eg this Article is no. 510 http://www.naace.co.uk/510

The Naace CMS enables collections of Articles to be grouped together into a publication eg an online Journal, Newsletter, Consultation papers or Think Tank reports.