[PamelaE]

Hi,

I am overseeing a redesign of Utimate Dallas , the Official site for the 80s TV show.

We have pulled together a redesign but on further reflection it was ditched.

Some elements created will be staying such a new flash top banner and a large flash promo player.

But does anyone have any ideas or site examples of how to categorise large amounts of content.

We have been hunting ideas but its so hard without it looking cluttered.

The site is being featured on a Tv special in a couple of months so there is quite a strict deadline in turning the site around.

Any advice would be most appreciated.

Also I know the size should be increased for larger screen sizes but annoyingly the new flash banner has been created at a width of 760, and is rounded off on the right side. So if we did make the site wider Im not sure how we would deal with that problem.

Thanks

[skyrocket]

i'm guessing you have researched other tv show websites to see how they have categorised all the information, what about the Star Trek sites or maybe even Starsky & Hutch, Dynasty, Simpsons etc...? otherwise maybe hire the services of a good wireframe/info architecture specialist.

[pgo]

Best I can say is read up on information architecture.

[steveb]

I had a look around the current site. There's an awful lot of stuff there to categorise and a lot of it doesn't really fit into one particular niche. But anyway, here's how I would go about it.

On a website like Dallas, you can do two basic things - read some text, or look at some visuals (photos or movies). So you could have two drop-down menus "Something to read" and "Something to look at". The first would list things like the Introduction, Episode Guides, the Chat Forum, the Community, Interviews, News, External Links etc. The second would group together Video Clips, Photo Gallery, sound clips, Fashions etc.

Then there's all the rest of the stuff which probably has to go on the front page like the win-a-dvd contest, newsletter sign-up, and the latest features column. With just two other menu items, there should be room for these!

There's quite a lot of clutter and confusion on the opening page, although I've seen very much worse. But it should be possible to de-clutter it considerably and come up with a handsome home page with a simple guide to help visitors find what they're interested in.