Organization

Organization of files and articles is paramount to building a maintainable content base and to avoid technical debt, and assigning each page a thoughtful and intentional place on the website is critical to maintaining a reliable information architecture. Articles are organized into three layers branching out from the home page.

Each major section of the website has a link on the site wide horizontal navigation bar and its own sidebar menu. The sidebar menu acts as a directory of all pages in that section. No page should be unlisted unless it is an internal test or technical page.

Within each section, there are many topics, these are the pages listed at the top level of the section's sidebar. There may be some topics that require more than one page to cover. These detail pages should be organized as an item under a dropdown of that topic.

Each page should be categorized according to what section of the site in which it lives. This makes searching through articles on the back end easier. Stories on the News site should be tagged with the sections in which the story is relevant. This information is used to sort the articles on both the back and front ends as well as to generate the proper RSS feeds.

Files

The media folder structure is equally important to keeping the website running as smooth as possible. Folders have already been set up to organize the files into a sustainable system.

On the News site, images should be organized by year and school semester. Spring runs from January to April, Summer runs from May to August, and Fall runs from September to December.

On the Annual Report site, images should be organized according by year.