Peter Furtado

If you have listened carefully to the opinions of your customers, paid attention to their changing wants and needs, and heard the wider conversations in your field, then you are in a far stronger position than ever before to understand and capitalise on the dynamics of your market niche.

We’re not the only consultancy to encourage our customers to do persona profiling; but we’re probably more ambitious about it than most, hoping you’ll get much more than the usual benefits of market understanding and usable design. As characterisations of typical customers (current or future), if you only treat your personas as people you can interrogate or sell to, you are going to let them – and yourselves – down. They’re worth more than that.

When you plan your information architecture, you are aiming to present your wares in a manner that will make immediate sense to your customers, while reflecting the particular values of your brand, but your IA serves another function as well. It offers the scaffolding for your thoughts - a bit like contents page of a book, or the timetable of a conference. It has to be logically organised.

News International’s decision to start charging for their online newspapers has led to a lot of debate: will this save The Times, and the rest of the Murdoch stable, from financial disaster, or consign them to oblivion by driving away human eyeballs and search-engine spiders?

I used to have a colleague who constantly worried about “getting all the ducks in a row”, by which he meant, I think, knowing what the elements of the task were and tackling them in the right order.

We talk a lot about community and community management, blogging and content-sharing, but while the sexy stuff is important, don’t forget the old-fashioned arts of editing and publishing when you’re planning and developing the inhouse parts of your website.

When a membership organisation or specialist magazine upgrades its web presence, it frequently concentrates on the impact of the new interactive functionality. That’s hardly surprising: opening itself out to community demands new skills, new habits of mind, and a new business model. But, while planning a community launch to produce lots of user-generated content and lots of ROI, don’t forget to spring-clean the copy you generate in-house too.

As always, the best way to answer the question is to think about real life. Personally I find joining an existing community (like a sports club) a fairly stressful business.