Enhancing Navigability in Websites Built Using Web Content Management Systems

Abstract

Websites built using Web Content Management Systems (WCMSs) usually provide their users with three types of access structures to surf their contents: indexes of categories, breadcrumb trails, and sitemaps. In addition, to¯nd contents of his/her interest, a user can perform more or less advanced full-text searches. In this paper we propose an automatic approach to extend the navigation structure of websites developed using WCMSs with Semantic Navigation Maps (SNMs), a complementary navigation structure that enables linking and navigating contents based on their lexical similarity. The approach uses an information retrieval technique (namely, Latent Semantic Indexing) to identify lexical similarities between textual contents, and a fuzzy clustering algorithm to form groups of similar web pages. For each page of the website, a set of navigation links towards pages showing similar content and a measure of such similarity is provided. The paper presents the approach to generate SNMs, an implementation for the Joomla! open source WCMS, and the results of an empirical evaluation involving two real world websites built using this WCMS.

A Survey on the Usability and User Experience of the Open Community Web Portals

“…Throughout the literature we found many examples for research on the usability of web applications [10,5,2,3]. User-experience (UX) has become a major area in open community portals which can be characterized as "users' judgment of product quality arising from their experience of interaction, and the product qualities which engender effective use and pleasure" [21].…”