Alphabetical order is necessary sometimes. More and more it isn’t.
If you’re thumbing through a printed encyclopedia, you appreciate alphabetical order. If you’re on Wikipedia, alphabetical order doesn’t matter so much. You just type a word or phrase into a search box.
Same goes for a printed telephone book versus an online directory.
Most of the real estate on the top two tiers of UM’s massive web site is cluttered with alphabetically ordered navigation links. It’s that way for three primary reasons:
- We have chosen through a political process to have so many links on our homepage and landing pages that alphabetical order is the only hope a Google-challenged visitor has of finding the link they’re looking for;
- Alphabetical order relieves us of the politically-charged burden of making value judgments about which links are more important and which links are less important (or altogether unnecessary) to our audience; and
- Producing consistently compelling content requires talent and resources. Alphabetical links are cheap and easy. We get what we pay for.
Cluttering our precious web space with alphabetized navigation links breaks my heart. We should be using that space to tell authentic stories, stir emotions, share values, provide service, converse and connect with our community and those we want to be part of our community in the future.
Alphabetically ordered navigation links communicate nothing about who we are. They only tell our web visitors that we have chosen to shift the burden of making sense of our complex organization to them.
I guess alphabetical order does tell a story.
