What to look for in a taxonomy manager, from Haven Nexus to Clade, Synaptica, and Wordmap …
Most legacy publishers have years and years of content that sits on their website and can still be extremely useful for their audience. In addition, they create new content all the time, and that only gets added to the goldmine of content they are already managing.
But how do users find the exact piece of content they are looking for? What makes your website easily manageable so that users have a great experience and find exactly what they are looking for when they are looking for it? This is where a taxonomy manager comes in.
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Your website taxonomy goes a long way in determining how easy it is to find content on your site. What is your website taxonomy? At its most basic, your taxonomy refers to the list of words and phrases that describe your content. How you set up and manage your taxonomy determines how easy it is to find content on your website.
Generally, most publishers start with big categories of content (such as travel, food, business, etc.). Information is then sorted into subcategories underneath and tagged. When information is structured this way, users can work their way from larger categories into more specific content, or search for specific content that is organized by tag.
Mequoda’s taxonomy manager: Haven Navigator
To make it easier for users to find information on your website, Mequoda developed the Haven Navigator system as part of its Haven Nexus customer experience management system (CXMS).
Maintaining your tags across all your content as you add it can be time consuming and burdensome. Editors spend an inordinate amount of their time tagging content or trying to determine if new tags are needed.
Haven Autotagger provides a user interface that allows operators to upload a CSV file of keywords and associated definitions. Then, as more content is added to your website, the system will automatically assign tags to appropriate posts based on the content. In addition, glossary and tag pages will be automatically generated with an associated definition (if one exists).
To help your users navigate your site more easily, the module uses the Haven Previous Next Post Link plugin that features page numbers instead of next and previous links so users can navigate to the page they want more quickly. It also helps optimize your site for search because it creates a tighter inner link structure.
The module also comes with a set of tools for operators to help manage the overall taxonomy. For example, the administrator can reorder your website categories via a drag and drop function via the Category Order Plugin.
As the operator adds a news post to your website, the Admin Post Navigator adds links to the next and previous posts. This feature makes it much easier for operators to manage content on the site and improve the user experience. In addition, the post navigator function allows previous and next links on all single post pages on your portal so that users can stay within a specific topic. So, an operator can add posts in multiple topic areas, but the previous and next links will refer to posts within the same specific topic.
To help keep user engagement high, the module includes the ability to keep posts with the greatest number of comments always on display. The operator can either use the widget in the sidebar to keep these on display or integrate the plugin as a template tag in theme files.
Just as importantly, the module will identify related posts based on the number of overlapping tags. This function searches through thousands of posts and tags quickly, and helps your audience quickly find related content.
Other à la carte taxonomony manager options
Choosing taxonomy management software isn’t made any easier by the lack of a common vocabulary about what the tasks entails. Different companies label their services as taxonomy management, ontology, business semantics, metadata, or knowledge organization systems.
Using an open source system will give you a lot of flexibility if you have a homegrown website system. Clade and Protégé are popular open source software solutions. Clade uses a browser-based interface and lets users import, create and edit taxonomies. It also allows you to classify a set of documents into a hierarchy the user defines. Protégé brags that what sets it apart is that it is supported by a team at Stanford University and is supported by the large community of users.
Other software solution providers include Synaptica and Wordmap. Both solutions offer that they can take complex information and change into a resource to help users access the most relevant content quickly.
Regardless of which system you choose, remember that in addition to creating a taxonomy for your information, you will want to edit the taxonomy and it should be easy to do. In addition, the workflow should be something that can work for everyone who is going to have access to the system, and not just one user.
And, finally, are there built-in connectors or integration complements? Does the tool integrate easily with your platform or server? Your Chief Technology Officer needs to be part of the discussion when choosing.
Haven Nexus is built with efficiency in mind
Haven Nexus CXMS is a state-of-the-art SaaS content management and publishing tool built, owned and maintained by Mequoda to enable all the functionality that multiplatform publishing businesses need to be successful and profitable.
Unlike retrofitted websites with disparate systems that make customer service and reporting more difficult, Haven Nexus gives you a complete, central database that informs your marketing decisions and helps you maximize the lifetime value of each subscriber. We manage all the infrastructure, so you never have to look under the hood.
We’ve even identified the best partners so you don’t have to research software, email, hosting, and other functions on your own, or take stabs in the dark. When you put your system management into the hands of the industry’s only strategy-centric provider, your organization reaps the benefits of stress-free technology, content-focused implementation and ongoing profitability.
Schedule a 30-minute complimentary consult with Mequoda’s founder Don Nicholas to learn more about Haven Nexus.
