Where's the peanut butter?

The grocery store is an interesting exercise in the limits of physical space with regards to organization. Many grocery stores have taken to placing certain items in multiple locations - a good example would be "natural" peanut butter - which is often found in both the "natural" foods section and in the "normal" peanut butter and jelly section. This is an attempt to make the limits of physical space more flexible and appeal to the needs of different tasks or users.

Technologists and webbies often point out that the web, and "Web 2.0" applications in particular, is limitless in terms of organization. In his excellent book "Everything is Miscellaneous," David Weinberger pointed out that this is the major difference between the physical and the digital in terms of taxonomy and organization.

However, the key point is - how does this apply to your website? Massive sites like amazon.com and flickr have created fascinating social organization and flexible site organizations, but for most companies, much of this functionality is still too expensive to develop or they just don't have the user base to make it useful - for example, the use of tagging to create "on the fly" architectures becomes more useful with more users and more data, and for a website with a few thousand visitors per month, it is fairly useless in most cases.

Additionally, you have to be careful when creating a flexible information architecture for a site, because, for example, if you place the same content in multiple places on your site, you run the risk of being penalized by search engines for having duplicate content at different urls on your site. This also can create a maintenance nightmare.

Content management systems like Drupal, Sitefinity, and many others are starting to offer much more flexibility in these areas for low start up costs. Properly implemented, these technologies are transparent to the user, and can allow you to phase in features based on user feedback and analytic data.