I read a thing Bill Gates said once that really stuck in my mind, and it's relevant now as we're redesigning our site to make it do a better job of packaging our wares. He was touring the Seattle Times -- and this was years ago -- and was being shown its website when he looked perplexed. I'm paraphrasing here, because I can't find the piece now, but I recall he said he didn't understand why the newspaper's content went online in the same basic order it went in the paper.
"You make all this stuff and put it where it belongs in the newspaper, but then you don't unbundle it to put it where it should go on the web," and again, I'm paraphrasing from memory here.
Let me put this a different way. If you were coming to our site to find a place to go hiking, you would never think to click on News, and then Metro and then North County to find the "Take a Hike" feature. But that's where we put such things when we base decisions about where things go online on where the material goes in the paper.
Obviously, any experienced web crawler would say, Hikes should go under Things to do.
There's other things that need to be unnewspaperized to be effective online. Names of newspaper sections in particular, a "Scene" section, for example, don't translate online. "Scene" = "Lifestyle." "Explore" = "Science." "Out & About" = "Entertainment."
The moral is that what works well in print may very well not work at all online. And the bottom line, as it is in all good design, is "don't make me think."
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