A Conversation About Organizing

Today 11:03 am

Hey Tony . . .

What’s up, Justin?

We really need to get going on organizing our website. I want to get this up and running soon. Why haven’t you answered my texts?

I hear ya. I was writing. You know I shut my phone off when I write. So what are we looking at with the whole thing?

For the most part, it’s lookin’ good. All we need to do is figure out how we want to organize our stories so that our viewers can navigate their way through and follow our main plotlines and sequels without confusion.

Cool. So what’s the problem?

We need to decide on how to go about organizing it.

What’s our options again?

This says it all:

As you can see, there are 5 ways to organize. With category, we can group stories that are similar to one another and then be searched by specified headings.

That actually sounds like it could work. Let’s keep it on the table. What else ya got?

You can also organize by time. By using this method, we could organize our stories chronologically or by time periods. We could even organize certain events that take place within the stories, like every time there’s a time traveling occurrence. I actually sent you some examples earlier. What did you think?

I didn't get it.

Didn't get what? The examples? I can text them again . . .

No, I mean I didn't get what you’re trying to say through the example.

Which one?

This one:

It’s a timeline. It’s an example of one way we can organize our interactive stories.

It’s food.

Get over the content. It’s just an example of how we can organize the story. We can have the main plotlines on either side of the arrow, like the Tang and Doritos, and the prequel and sequels can branch off of that, like the Jamba Juice or Dippin’ Dots.

How about this instead?

It’s a timeline. I showed you a timeline.

But its not food.

Dude . . .

Alright. Alright. I’m hesitant to use a timeline to present our stories because a lot of them can stand on their own. You don’t have to read one before understanding what’s going on in another. What about categories?

I get where you’re coming from, but doing categories seems like a cop out.

I don’t get it . . .

It seems like categories is the way people organize when they don’t know how else to fit it all together. Everyone does categories.

Really? ‘Everyone does categories’? It’s not just a place for randomness. Here’s an example: our one story that is set in Ireland and the Pooka and a Banshee meet at a cairn at midnight for an epic showdown. For this, we could have a geographical category or mythological category.

It could also work in a timeline.

How? Where would you put it? This story stands on its own. If you’re basis for using a timeline is more the chronology of our writing, like first story we ever wrote and on down the line, it won’t work. We've bounced around with these stories — its not a series.

Show me an example.

And you gave me shit about a timeline of food?

Point taken. It’s just a visual. I think if we organized with categories, we would have a lot more to work with. We could combine categories with location or we could have a drop down menu within the categories that displays selections alphabetically.

Yes, but with a timeline you have organizing options. I’m not saying we have to organize our stories in a linear series, but I think a timeline that lists our stories in their specific time frames would work best. The story titles could be direct links to that particular story. At the end of each story we could also offer a few suggestions for what to read next.

You’re writing a book with these long text messages.

Whatever, your’s was just as long.

Well??

Settle, will you? I was looking through some options.

I think the titles being links to the stories is a great idea and I like the suggested “what to read next” at the bottom, but if we did that, we should make sure there’s a way to show viewers where they've already been so they’re not looping between the same set of examples.

We could have the titles change to a different font color once they've specifically been linked to, no matter where it is on our site. So you’re on board with timeline then?

Not a 100%. I still like categories. Looking back at your earlier text about The Five Hat Racks and revisiting all our options. BRB.

Today 1:17 pm

Justin. You busy? Sorry it took so long.

You suck. What’d you come up with? Dude, you better have come up with something . . .

Whatever, Tony. I was gone for like an hour. Anyway, I was checking some stuff out and I think I may have come up with something pretty solid. Still diggin’ categories BTW . . .

Yeah, kinda figured. I was looking around some more too. I was looking into how we could use hierarchy as a way to organize. At first, I was against using this form because I thought it was simply all about “highest to lowest” and “best to worst”. But then I did a Google search and found some cool info that shows examples of different ways we could use this on our site.

Check it out : “How to organize information and improve your design.”

The info on hierarchy is really good. And it makes sense to do this type of organization as our site grows because I can see our site getting jumbled as it expands. We could start off with a nest structure (the simplest form) and then as our site and stories grow, maybe we could move it into more of a stair structure.

I agree. The nest structure reminds me of a blog page and how it has parent/child pages. The stair structure is also a great one and I agree it should only be contemplated once our complexity as a website expands. Since a stair structure resembles an outline, however, my only concern would be that it might mislead viewers into thinking the stories are sequential and I think we've already established that our stories aren't necessarily best suited for a chronology.

I know this brings the conversation back to a timeline for organization and, although I don’t think it’s the best way do a primary organization, I think it might work well to show geographical relation within our stories.

Like this:

Yemen . . . haha . . . very funny.

The more I read and the more I think about this, well, I think we should look at using various ways to organize throughout our website. Like we could use alphabetizing for our glossary of terms and pronunciations. And like you were saying with a hierarchy (using superordinate/subordinate) we can let our viewers know what our entire content is about.

So, if we’re not doing a timeline for primary organization, what would we use? How would we display parent pages?

I think the best way is with categories.

Knock it off. Stop being so anti-category and just hear me out.

Listening . . .

The easiest way to display parent pages is to put them into categories. The taxonomy could look something like this:

History | Time Jumps | Mythology | Relationships | Geography | Battles

Well?

I think once we were able to get over our initial way of thinking, in that we need only choose one way to organize, then we were better able to expound new ideas and realize we can use a few different organization schemes to achieve exactly what we want.

Dude, you know I’m right; you know this will work.

Contemplating . . .