Considerations in FARN's Information Architecture

By Popi Kleinman, Fundación Ambiente y Recursos Naturales (FARN)
May 2001

While the FARN site (http://www.farn.org.ar) largely mirrors the organization's management structure, some consideration was given to breaking this pattern for special online modules of interest to their users.

When redesigning FARN's Web site, the Direction department wanted to put the online publications and EcoLegis (the Environmental Law Database) as subsections under the Information Centre top section, because both of them were built through the Information Centre department. As the log statistics have always shown that those resources were the most visited by users, after some discussions the Webmaster could convince the Directors to put them as top sections, at the same level than the Information Centre section, but keeping an access to both of them through the Information Centre at the same time. This resulted in a more useful Web site structure.

Another exception was made for the online information about a joint Trade and Environment initiative between FARN and Fundación Futuro Latinoamericano (FFLA). While FFLA staff carried out the majority of the research, FARN was responsible for providing Web support. First, all the information was placed as a sublevel under the Programs section, but having its own graphic and structure design, different from the rest of the Web site. It was more like a separate Web site. After a while, it was noticed that the chosen location for the information was confusing, because it seemed like a FARN project when it actually was not. So the question of where to put this content needed a better answer.

In one hand, it was a sort of Web site which will be online until the initiative is over. On the other hand, it was unlikely that FARN will build more separated Web sites like this. So, opening a new section for it (such as "Other Web sites" or something like this) was not justified, above all because when the initiative is over and its information taken off, there would be a hole in the whole Web site structure, and a deeper and more time costly change would be necessary to fix it.

Finally, FARN decided to put a sort of banner on its homepage with a link to the initiative's site, which reflects more coherently the organization's structure, and is easy to remove once the initiative is over without changing too much the Web site structure.