Jeff Bridgforth :: Webcraftsman

Crafting Web sites since 1999

I am a Web designer passionate about creating elegant, inspiring, and usable Web experiences that connect with an audience and fulfull business objectives.

Is Tagging Right for Your Site?

July 31, 2006

Random

(This post is also fea­tured on eMi­nistry Notes.)
Last week, I par­tic­i­pated in a vir­tual sem­i­nar done by Josh Porter of UIE. The topic was “is tag­ging right for your site?” Tag­ging is part of Web 2.0. Tags are like key­words but the big dif­fer­ence is that they are deter­mined by the user not the infor­ma­tion archi­tects of the web­site. And unlike tra­di­tional cat­e­gories on some sites, you can have mul­ti­ple tags on an object like a photo, con­tent or peo­ple. If you would like some more infor­ma­tion on tag­ging, I would sug­gest some of these arti­cles writ­ten by Joshua Porter:

You can see exam­ples of tag­ging on Flickr, del.icio.us, and Google video. One Cam­pus Cru­sade min­istry site that is using tag­ging is StorySpot.com.

One of the key ben­e­fits of tag­ging is that the users are deter­min­ing the words so tags speak the user’s lan­guage. This has been a big chal­lenge for any­one try­ing to do infor­ma­tion archi­tec­ture on a web­site, to get the cat­e­gories in lan­guage that is mean­ing­ful to the user. As we know, what is mean­ing­ful to us as web devel­op­ers is not always (usu­ally) mean­ing­ful or con­nect with those try­ing to use our sites.

The best insight I got from the sem­i­nar is that the most com­mon use and the one that is the great­est ben­e­fit to users right now is tag­ging for per­sonal retrieval and orga­ni­za­tion. Users are tag­ging things that they want to be able to find later. Joshua said that as we think about imple­ment­ing tag­ging, it works best when we are seek­ing the per­sonal ben­e­fit of the user.

Given the fact that one of the great­est ben­e­fits that users are get­ting from tag­ging right now is per­sonal retrieval, I think that there are sev­eral min­istry sites that would be greatly enhanced be tag­ging. I would love to imple­ment it on one of my min­istry sites, GodSquad.com. Most of the site is a repos­i­tory for some of the best resources and tools that the US Cam­pus min­istry has devel­oped. I can think of at least two emails this past year that asked for eas­ier ways of remem­ber­ing con­tent. I see tag­ging as a pos­si­ble solu­tion to many things I have been think­ing about in regards to improv­ing the site.

As I con­tinue to process the mate­r­ial from the sem­i­nar, I hope to share some more insights.

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