Thank you, Virginia.gov, for a Better User Experience

State government websites have the enormous challenge of presenting a unified presence on the web while also giving autonomy to the hundreds of organization sites within them - and on a limited budget.

The incredible shrinking main navigation

Recently someone mentioned to me the main navigation on cnn.com. I've read that site every day for about 6 years, but I couldn't tell you what even one of the main navigation items was. Lorem? Ipsum? No idea. What's interesting about this to me is that it was never a conscious decision on my part. I never realized that I never used it - I just didn't because, apparently, I didn't need it.

Now that I'm paying more attention, I'm noticing all kinds of creative ways that online publishing sites are de-emphasizing main navigation in favor of robust and well-designed homepages, user-driven navigation, and tag linking techniques. In this blog entry I share a few of these different techniques.

Build attractive site maps in minutes using OmniGraffle

OmniGraffle's built-in diagram styles are pretty sweet, essentially building/connecting/arranging shapes for you while you just type up an outline. However, for more complicated hierarchical diagrams like site maps, things can get ugly in a hurry once you exceed a certain number of shapes - which is why I built my own custom diagram style and made it publicly available.