Inspired by the Spokesman Review, I rolled out taxonomy-based navigation for the NY City News Service last night. Readers can navigate by topics, places, and media. Special projects are also more accessible. One neat thing about WordPress’ custom taxonomies is that I can design different landing pages for each taxonomy, and then even go as far as create unique pages for each term. The navigation is just the beginning.

Doing some inspiration harvesting this afternoon, I discovered that The Spokesman Review has really slick topical pages. I’m impressed with the incorporation of a navigation element into the display of the text. The image above is from the tag page for “environment”; the tag itself, however, is within an input box that the reader can manipulate. Deleting the word and then typing a new one generates a live-updating menu of all the available tags with that text. In my opinion, this design approach makes more of the page useful to and malleable by the reader. Being able to filter results by content type is also a progressive feature, although I think it would be more useful if the default were “All content.”

When navigation functionality like this becomes a part of the design, a website can become exponentially more useful to the reader.