Years ago, when I was running Optimizers Club, I taught an approach to site architecture that relied on using tags to connect content across different categories.
Rather than creating endless subcategories, we'd use meaningful relationships to give visitors and search engines additional ways to discover relevant content.
It worked particularly well on content-heavy websites.
I've recently found myself applying the same thinking to the new project I've been building, although on a considerably larger scale.
The website itself is a fairly sophisticated application, but one of the more interesting challenges has been organising the information that powers it.
We're dealing with businesses, locations, individual products and a considerable number of characteristics that can overlap.
Something might belong to a particular geographical area, have several defining characteristics, and be relevant to multiple types of searches.
Trying to accommodate every possible combination through conventional categories would be a nightmare.
To give you an idea of the scale…
At the last recorded inventory, the project contained approximately:
1,669 individual products
486 physical locations
329 businesses
61 controlled tags or classifications