Blog

After launching eCrowds in a beta incubation stage just over a year ago, we've gained valuable insight from those organizations, including our own, using the product to manage their web content and B2B web communities. As 2009 draws to a close, we're getting ready to kick off some exciting new development work to the eCrowds SaaS content and community management system in the New Year.

If you currently use or have interest in using the eCrowds system and have suggestions for the product, we request you submit your ideas via our idea exchange. Your feedback is critical in shaping the development of the system and we will continue to actively incorporate user ideas into the eCrowds product in 2010.

The eCrowds system provides a taxonomy-based architecture model that allows you to add and remove sections of your site with the click of a mouse. We advise using a logical, hierarchical structure when creating your site taxonomy. To do so:

1. Login to the eCrowds system at http://go.ecrowds.com
2. Enter your user credentials
3. Click "Components" in the left navigation and select "Taxonomies"
4. To create a new taxonomy, click "Create new taxonomy"
5. Start by logically naming your taxonomy. While right now you may only have one main portion of your site, you may later decide to add additional sites and subsites to accommodate your growing needs. Name your taxonomy with a specific and intuitive name.
6. The "Empty" region should already be highlighted. Click "Edit Selected" or Fill in a name and click "Add Category."

The base of your site taxonomy should also be named logically and refer to the site its managing. If this taxonomy you're setting up is for your main website, naming your base level something like Home, or CompanyA-Home is advised.

7. Add sections and subsections stemming from your home level to demonstrate the actual intended structure of your website.

For example, maybe your site is going to have top-level navigation items or headers, with sub-pages within each (as is the case with most web sites). Each of these main "headings" should be their own top level entries in your site's taxonomy. 

8. Within each taxonomy category, add sub-categories that will represent the drilled-down pages and categories in each of your main taxonomy categories.

Let's say under services, you have Service A, Service B, and Service C. The products portion of your taxonomy should look like this:

You can edit any taxonomy category at any time and are even able to customize what content types each section of your site indexes. For example, you may want the "blog" section of your site to only index blog posts and not other page types. With eCrowds, you are able to determine what content is indexed where at the taxonomy-level.

For more information and suggestions about setting up your site taxonomy with eCrowds please visit our "Taxonomy Best Practices" article.