Collected Best Practices for Taxonomy Design

Portal Architecture

Start with just one portal.
Reserve friendly names.
Lock down the portal database. What happens when you don't (and the databases become split across files).
Create a dedicated WSS virtual server.
Library Success: A Best Practices Wiki.

Portal Management

When to create a new site, area, or portal.
Provide top-level site names (e.g. myArea.myweb/).

Presentations

Toronto SharePoint User Group, September 21, 2005: Site architecture and taxonomy design