SlideShare: Unique Organization & Digital Content Display Service
Introduction
Currently, people are living in a digital era where digitalization is dictating to get things done more quickly and efficiently. In the past, people would study physical books to gain knowledge and become something in life. According to David Weinberger in the “Unsettling Knowledge: Knowing in the Networked Age” YouTube video, books are the old form of organizing knowledge. One flaw of physical books is that “books tell you when to stop and can only store limited information and is confined” (Weinberger).
In the past, books are the storage place for information. At present, the internet is a go-to place for storing pieces of information. The internet is the storage place where you keep adding information or giving a visual appearance in any other form of a digital document without any limitations. There are many different ways to organize and display information on the internet. The article will focus on what way an online content management service like SlideShare works to share some critical insights about processes of organizing and displaying content in a way to transform information into meaningful knowledge.
For someone, who has yet to learn about what a content management system is, it is a user-friendly interface for managing, creating, and organizing content in a structured manner to come up with new ways for people to express themselves by using clever information-architecture techniques. By the way, information architecture is a job title where a person’s role is to organize information to convert it into knowledge by making it findable and usable for various purposes.
Background History of SlideShare
Moving on, let’s start by talking about what is the SlideShare service and its history. There are many content management systems in the market, and the purpose is to create, manage, and publish digital content in the Internet space. According to Wikipedia, SlideShare’s founders were Amit Ranjan, Rashmi Sinha, and Jonathan Boutelle. The SlideShare website presented information using the format of a PowerPoint presentation. A fun fact about SlideShare is the first platform for sharing knowledge in a visually engaging framework.
SlideShare was very popular after launching in the year 2006 because they were able to publish presentations online and share their presentations with other people. SlideShare evolved from creating a centralized program where users could upload and share their visual content to building features where users can get valuable insights about the content’s performance by the number of likes and downloads of the presentations.
Taxonomy of SlideShare
The design of a website is successful when people can understand with just one look to notice what the website is about. One scenario I can think of is that people want to understand things in a simplified way because their attention span is decreasing. People do not want to take a chunk of their time to understand what service the website provides and how a website is solving their problems.
In this kind of scenario, the concept of taxonomy comes to the rescue. According to the Enterprise Knowledge YouTube video, the general conception of taxonomy is the use of controlled vocabulary to indicate the collection of information presented on the website. The use of controlled vocabulary helps us connect the dots to learn about the motive of the SlideShare website. When you get into the SlideShare website, the use of the word “SlideShare” immediately tells us the website contains slides that are sharable with others. Then the word “explore” encourages the user to spend time on the website. The director of the non-profit organization Matt Grossman shares with us that “words are critical to each content piece to help identify larger contexts”(Matt Grossman).
How Does the Navigation Meau of the SlideShare Website Work?
Let’s start by briefly describing the term “Web Navigation.” According to indeed.com, web navigation refers to clickable internal links on the website that takes you from one place to another place. For example, clicking on the “upload” internal link will take you to the upload page where you can upload any document onto their website. SlideShare is a heavily content-based website, so they have different types of navigation that help users find the content they are looking for based on the topics listed on the website.
According to the “Website Navigation: Planning And Implementing” article, all websites have Primary and Secondary navigation that act as a guide person for the user. There are two types of navigation to get the specific content user is looking for. The navigation bar on top, illustrated in the image, is the simple horizontal navigation acting as primary navigation that stands for the content most users are interested in. The navigation bar on the bottom, illustrated in the navigation image, is the vertical navigation with a drop-down menu acting as a filter that helps to filter out specific content the user is looking for.
In addition, two main navigation bars are signified as primary and secondary because they never disappear when going from one web page to another web page within the website. There are positioned on the top and bottom of the website so that people can directly go to the website page by avoiding clicking the back button in the left-hand side top corner if you are using google chrome as your browser.
Design of the SlideShare Website
There are a lot of websites that provide tons of information on their website for the users. The common problem with those heavily based content websites is that information is not organized and is cluttered to the point it is hard to look for the right content. Content material presented in different formats or styles can only be converted into knowledge when arranged meaningfully on the screen.
SlideShare showcases the content material in a way that tells you the content is in the presentation format. Everything has its own space that helps to avoid cluttering information in one place, which we often see in heavy content-based websites. The rectangular box shows itself as an individual storage container for storing knowledge in one place. There is space between each independent element to help us see different pieces of information woven together to get the final product as knowledge, which is valuable to everyone.
The SlideShare website shows the hierarchy in different ways. One way to display this is by converting the title of the presentation into a hyperlink. The hyperlinked titles have different font colors to show the hierarchy. Another way is using h1, h2, and h3 tags to emphasize the headings of the page. For example, when you are on the home page, “Discover. Share. Learn” is the h1 heading tag, and the line below it is the H2 heading tag.
In terms of the display of the SlideShare website, where you can see the SlideShare presentation shared by people, it reminds you of the YouTube design. When you click on the slide deck to view it, it takes you to the web page where you can see the SlideShare presentation. The “SlideShare presentation” web page displays in a way that encourages people to engage by viewing the slide and exploring other SlideShare slide decks. SlideShare added features like a “Like button,” “views,” and a profile page that helps to build the authority and credibility of the content and the author who created the slide decks.
