Background

In building this community, one of the most difficult decisions we encountered was the organization of content. There are several axes of information around which we could organize, but settled on the following:

• Consumer electronics product category (MP3 player, Digital Camera, etc.)
• Type of article (Knowledge, Experience, Opinion)
• Order in which article was submitted
• Usefulness of the article

We knew that we wanted to incorporate all of these navigation paths, but the question remained how to accomplish this without confusing our community.

It was important to us when visiting the site that it was readily apparent that there was a lot of information to consume and the content was appealed to a wide variety of interests. We also thought that many of our articles would span consumer electronics categories (e.g. How to Connect a MP3 player to a Stereo), so it didn't make sense to have that be our primary navigation.

So, we decided that our navigation would include the type of article as primary navigation and usefulness/order as secondary navigation paths within the type of article. Product category would be tertiary.

How TechLore is Organized

Knowledge, Experience, and Opinion

The home page organizes content into three categories as given below:

• Knowledge - simply the facts. Knowledge-based examples include objective articles that explain concepts and teach you the basics, news and historical record, glossaries, etc.
• Experience - the personal stories. Experience-based examples include testimonials, discussions, rituals, and traditions that pass on each person's trials and tribulations.
• Opinion - the soapbox. Opinion-based examples include product reviews, personal advice, editorials, predictions, and satire.

You will see these themes featured prominently on the TechLore web site in many places including icons in article lists as well as on the home page.

Usefulness and Order of Submission

Within each column given by the type of article above, you can navigate our Featured articles which are based on the usefulness of the article or by order of submission through the Recently published articles.

• Usefulness - The usefulness of an article is a complicated series of formulas based on several factors that include the article's rating, page views, credibility of the author, credibility of the reader, among others. As you can imagine, it is very difficult to calculate. So difficult in fact, that we built a software Content Engine specifically for this purpose.
• Order - Rather than only showing popular articles, which would continue to make only those articles popular, it made sense to show articles that were most recently submitted. This is a simple last in, first out algorithm that places the most recently submitted articles at the top of the list.

Product Categories

Lastly, we felt it important to include a way to browse based on type of device category as many users are already used to this mechanism from other similar websites. Since articles may be associated with multiple categories when browsing, they will show up in multiple article lists based on this category where appropriate. This control is located on the left column when navigating.

Final Notes

We hope that you find our navigation scheme refreshing, different and of course useful as compared to other sites. As you can see, a lot of thought and planning has gone into it to ultimately bring you the content that you desire in the most efficient and reliable way.