Content Types
- In real life, we handle different pieces of content with different content types, each with their specific structure.
- When we handle a business case, or to find a digital solution, we should define how many different content types we need, before going into the structure of the individual content.
- For more information on Content Structure, please press the following button.
Pages and Blocks
Web Pages
Everybody is familiar with web ages. A web page is typically where we place text and images in order that it can be viewed by other people. A web page is normally associated with a link, or also called URL, which can come from an item on the menu, from a button, or from a hyperlink in the content from the same or different site.
To roughly classify web pages in our context, examples of a conventional web page include the About Us or Company Introduction, which is a content type of static nature, meaning it doesn't change too often. However, there are also types of web pages which keep coming in, and is dynamic in nature, such as news, blogs, or even videos like YouTube.
Lists
News, blogs and articles are common web pages which new ones are continually coming. This is an example of a dynamic content type. The way to handle such pages is to display them in a list, probably in alphabetic or date order. The list itself forms a page. Instead of a page of a specific content, this becomes a page of a list.
We still cannot handle unlimited items in a list on a single page. Paging are normally available so that items in the list will be divided into groups. For example, the first page will list the first 20 items. Page 2 will list items 21-40, and so on. A pagination mechanism is normally available.
List can take many different display formats, the most common ones are lines, table or grid. But sometimes it can also take a form that not easily recognized it is a list, such as photo gallery, sliding banners and calendar. In terms of content structure, they are also list.
Blocks
In a site, web pages are normally always associated with a link. When user type the link in a browser, the page will appear. The link can be understood as the address of the web page. In a site, there is always a space for display this page, which forms the main content for the link. This area, or also called region, is the main content area, which normally takes up the biggest space in the middle of the screen.
However, the websites we normally see composed of many other elements, such as the banners, and some blocks on either or both sides which we can call it sidebar, and information at the footer. Some of these side information even appear around different pages or even at different timing. All these other elements outside of the main content area can be called blocks. Site builders or designers make use of these different blocks to build and design different appearance achieving different results.
Blocks can be placed in different areas of the site around the main content area according to the layout design, which basically can be understood as regions. A site layout governs the design of the regions available. It can be more simple, but sometimes can be very complicated. When regions are designed, we can place different blocks into different regions.
Site Layout
A site layout comprise of different regions in different proportions and spacing. Designing layouts requires much more technical knowhow, and it is not under our scope here. The only thing we need to know is the concept about it, in particular the concept of regions and blocks as mentioned above.
Conceptually, we can consider content in a site compose of only 2 types of elements: (1) the page; and (2) blocks. It is a matter of how we play around with these 2 types of content elements. For every page, there is only one main content area, but we have many other regions where we can place blocks. Basically for every link, we can display only a dedicated page associated with the link.
Of course, we can have many different pages too, each with a unique link. These links are governed by:
- menu - each item in a menu is actually a link
- hyperlinks from different pages
- buttons designed in the site located everywhere, pages or blocks
Basically there can be no difference between a page and a block, except its size and location. That means blocks also compose of text and images just like normal web pages too. However, site builders or programmers sometimes also require additional functionalities, which are normally built on blocks.
It is worthwhile to mention about Site Layout Map. As a good practice, it is recommended to place a site layout map in the site, not only to help users to browse through the content, but also help to improve the SEO.
Taxonomy
Theoretically, unlimited content can be placed on a site by just continually increasing pages and URLs. Classification becomes very important which is also called taxonomy.
In a website, or even in real life, things cannot run away from classification. Very often, we are doing classification but we might not even realize. In the example of a website, following are some examples of classifications:
- menu - menu is most likely the first level of classification. We look for different content by navigating first through the menu. We can have multiple menu in a site. Each menu can have multiple levels. Each item in a menu is actually just a link, but designed with the proper wording for the text displayed.
- lists are classification - we group different pages of the same type into a list. When users look through a list, we are helping them to filter the content in the site into a single type, displayed in the format of list.
- tags, including hash tags which is popular on social networks. The purpose of tagging is to help us find them easier. It is essentially a filtering, therefore also a type of classification.
To go deep, there are many more types of classifications, and more importantly real applications which solve our problems.
Last but not least, we should also mention the keyword metadata. It is related text for specific purpose, such as for searching, or for SEO. Metadata can also be part of taxonomy.
Navigation
We mentioned menu, which basically compose of a planned hierarchy of items which are actually links in nature, covered with proper text wordings. It is important because it is normally where users will first look into, in order to find the content they want. Therefore the function of menus is for navigation.
In a site, it is possible to have multiple menus in a single site, and can be placed in different areas, including sometimes being hidden. There are different variations of menu, such as button in case of mobiles, or icons which is very popular nowadays. Combining menus and lists, it forms majority of the content navigation on a site. Do not forget the purpose fo a list is to align and filter the entry points for pages.
Breadcrumb is a tool to show users the navigational direction of where they are in a site. But whether it is available depends on the site builders or designers. It becomes less important due to the mobile devices, where area of display on the screen becomes small.
The site map mentioned above can also form part of the navigation. A properly designed site map will make things appears more logical and better organized.
Hyperlinks
Links, or also called hyperlinks, takes an important role in web-based content creation. From the perspective of content structure, proper use of links will
- Connects objects of similar or different natures, or from different sources together. In our context
- It connects pages together instead of having everything on a single page
- It connects to additional information of interests
- It links to the origins and allows us to check the source of information
- Improve user experience because it is a time saver when all these discrete information and pages can be connected together
However, how good it works depends on the content creators. Of course it is a lot of works.
Search
Searching is an important feature, and affect a lot in the area of usability and reliability. Whether the search result be too much or insufficient, both are not satisfactory.
Search can also be understood as filtering. It filters out content from long list to those that are relevant. It is a matter of how to work around the relevancy. Another important factor for search is the list position in the search output result. It is about how what factors and algorithms can be available to govern the filtering and ranking in search. Defining the scope of search obviously affects the results a lot. Whether or not the users are allowed the flexibility to define the scope of search is a consideration. Facet search, for example, is the methodology providing such controls by the users.
We mentioned about metadata. When we come to the area of search, metadata can play a very important part. Things seemingly irrelevant can be connected by invisible metadata. Context is another difficult one, but it provides additional seemingly invisible information to the search. User history is another dimension. User's background, site history, search history, click history can all contribute to the search criteria giving unbelievable results.
There are different methods to provide search utility. It can be implicit in the site, or can be from external. Implicit means search function provided by the site. External means allow external search agents to work on the site to provide the search engine. Search by itself is a huge topic. It really is something not simple, and involves a lot of high end technology.
In Drupal, different search methods can be built, including facet search which compose of different search dimensions. We can define different fields to be included in the search, which normally increase the accuracy and reduce unnecessary items. Taxonomy is an important feature adds to the search function. All these features are normally sufficient for most small and medium size organizations.
For really large organizations or large projects, additional measures might be needed. External search mechanism might be employed. The most commonly seen methodology is to integrate Drupal with Apache Solr, which is an open-source search engine. Google also offer their custom search service, which can be integrated with individual sites. These methods are outside the scope of this site.
Last but not least, very often we consider search very mysterious. It still requires indexing, and indexing takes time. When the system operates, it might not necessary perform indexing every minute. As a result, new content just published may not be immediately searchable, until maybe after a few hours. This the same applies in Drupal by default. This is to avoid system over-loading all the time, therefore prioritizing jobs around..