Tagging, an alternative navigation method - Siteflex

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  • Tagging, an alternative navigation method

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    11 October, 2010

    Your standard site navigation structure is great for organising your website's pages in a way that makes sense to you and your organisation from a general view. However, when somebody arrives at your website, more often than not they are on a specific mission, a mission that is unlikely to be an exact match for your site's structure. How do you then guide this person into relevant areas of your website, areas on larger sites that may sometimes be in a completely different section?

    Tagging, A Formal Introduction

    Tags are short keywords that define what your content is all about. They can help form organic navigation paths which can be especially useful for when there are multiple distinct reasons for users to be visiting a larger website.

    A tag is a non-hierarchical keyword or term assigned to a piece of information (such as an Internet bookmark, digital image, or computer file). This kind of metadata helps describe an item and allows it to be found again by browsing or searching.
    -Wikipedia

    Tags and tagging should be understood by most web-savvy users. The concept of tagging and tag navigation is not new, having already been successfully implemented on many websites, Siteflex and beyond.

     

    Tagging, with Siteflex

    Siteflex currently allows you to tag your Pages, with plans for our tagging system to expand to all corners of Siteflex; Products, News, Events, Photo Galleries and more.

    It is in your hands to develop your own site's internal tagging dialogue. Our tagging system allows you to quickly select from any tags you may have already used to try and keep things nice and consistent, and hence relevant.

     

    Tagging, the nitty gritty

    For advanced users, the related content codes for showing a list of tagged items are:

    • tagged
      tagged=num, tag1, tag2, tag3, tag4, tag5, opt

      List items that have been tagged with a set of up to 5 tags (ie. items tagged "food" and "italian")
       
    • tagged_all
      tagged_all=num, tag1, tag2, tag3, tag4, tag5, opt

      List all items that have been tagged with any of up to 5 tags (ie. items tagged "food" or "italian").

    • random_tagged
      random_tagged_all


      These are the same as tagged and tagged_all above, but random.

     

    Advanced users are also able to list the most popular tags themselves:

    • popular_tags
      popular_tags=num

      List the most popular tags on the site, by popularity. (ie. the tags that have been applied to the most amount of content)
    • tag_cloud
      tag_cloud=num

      List the most popular tags on the site, alphabetically and with special font size styling applied to make the more popular tags appear larger or other customisations.

    Interested in getting tagging onto your Siteflex website? Get in contact and ask us.