DC Advice: What website organizes a lot of pages and content the best?

[mouser]

The DonationCoder.com has a lot of different content..
In addition to the forum there is the reviews, software, specials and discounts, contests, podcasts, some articles, help pages, etc.
Then on the forum itself we have the programming school, review commentaries, etc.

It's a lot of information and i don't think we're doing the best job of presenting it..
Furthermore, it's not the easiest thing to maintain.

I keep looking at CMS systems but not found anything perfect yet.

I'm looking for inspiration from other sites that do a nice job of cleanly and simply organizing a lot of content in an easy-to-navigate way.  Simplicity of presentation is a key desire - rather than an overwhelming swarm of information all crammed on one page..

Suggestions?  Favorite sites that do a good job?

[mouser]

come on guys and gals! little help please.

[crono]

Sites with huge content and good Navigation:
- www.microsoft.com
- http://www.mozilla.com
- www.typo3.org (lot of Documentation, Extension, News...)
- www.apple.com (Tabs)
- www.amazon.com
- www.imdb.com
- www.sourceforge.net
- www.codeproject.com
- http://espn.go.com/



Negative examples in my opinion:
- www.adobe.com
- www.zdnet.com
- www.xbox.com
- www.apple.com (Sitestructur)
- www.dell.com (I bourght my Laptop there - it was really an Advanture)
- www.t-online.de (the worst big site)

[Rover]

I think you put Microsoft at the top of the wrong list... should be one of the worst...

[crono]

No - I think Microsoft does a pretty good job in organizing huge amount of content on their Site...

[urlwolf]

hmm,
I think DONATION CODER has  a mixture of forums and static, normal html pages. Most info spans the two formats. E.g., the reviews have some forum topics. The problem is that these two are not well connected. sometimes there is a link to the forum topic, but some other times I just found it by accident.

Plus the content is so actively changing that it is difficult to keep track of it! E.g., the backup software review... After Genie backup was crowned, two or three other applications have appeared that could dispute the crown. By the way, I have a really bad experience with genie backup support, they really are clueless about some topics.

How to solve this? I have no idea. Many sites have a mixture of forums, blogs, and static pages... but the cocktail is not always good.

I'd be very interested in seeing what examples other people post...

[crono]

if I had to buid DC from scratch, I would run the following setup:

Software, Specials and discounts, articels: Use a CMS - I would use Typo3 or Drupal - yes I know, we had this before (another topic), but especially Typo is so incredibly powerfull - yes, it has a huge learningcurve, but when your "in" the system you can do anything with it.

Documentation Pages: Some Wiki Software - I prefer "DokuWiki", but Media- or PHPWiki would do the Job also very good. Or Keep them in the CMS

BugTracking: maybe Mantis...

Contests, Reviews: for the Contents and Reviews, I would write a Extension for the CMS to keep them "structured", or keep them as they are

Forum: Hmmmm switching from one Forum to another without losing all posts isnt trivial. I think, I would stay at SMF and tune it a bit - another Theme, some Syntax Coloring Extension and so on

Podcasting: I never used any Podcastsoftware, but I heard loudblog (www.loudblog.de) should be good

[jgpaiva]

I think you put Microsoft at the top of the wrong list... should be one of the worst...

It might be because it has sooo much information, but i still support your opinion, it's hard to find what you want in microsoft's site, most of the times i google the whole site.