Forum Moderators: open
Navigation through the site is becoming increasingly difficult for me to manage. Basically, its a collection of short stories and poetry being submitted by whoever. Every piece gets a month with "front page" listing, then after that gets bumped to the archive.
Thing is, I want to keep the archive as accessible as possible, and I also want to make sure that if you get directed to an archive story from a search engine (this accounts for about 90% of the site's traffic), its easy to "climb back out" to the front, or to just about any other story, particularly other stories by the same author.
Main issues: Easy of maintenance. This is a hobby site, not my job. Ease/intuitiveness of navigability. High levels of browser compatibility.
Currently using a traditional top-menu bar that leads to index pages, and a java-applette side menu, that expands and collapses categories, allowing access to any page from any other page.
The applette has the advantage of drawing the list of pages from 1 central text file, the disadvantage of being wickedly slow.
I'm trying to come up with some options. As the site gets bigger every month, the thought of doing a sitewide change to a new navigation system becomes more and more daunting. I'm looking for ideas, ANY ideas on how to work navigation.
perhaps you need to have very broad categories that have a new navigation sub element.
for instance I have a travel site that using a link for "lodging" to lodging.html.
the lodging.html page has the global navigation, then a special sub category navigation box that has links to hotels.html, rentals.html etc.
all of the lodging category pages employ this special subcategory navigation. if someone then clicks on the global navigation to go to "restaurants", for example, a new subcategory navigation appears that links to restaurants-categoryX.html, restaurants-categoryY.html etc.
this is a simple way to guide people through your site help send the bots to every page of your site, help certain SEs "theme" subsets of your site, etc etc.
anyhow, works for me.
However, you said an applet, so I know it's java. Do not even think about doing that, please. The only benefit -- you would never need to worry about a search engine bringing visitors to your deep pages.
I'd say Patrick has the right idea; you need a second level of navigation. How you want to break that down is up to you. Onee obvious approach from what you've said might be by date. But that might get unweildy too, and it doesn't really categorize your poems the way topics might, or poetic style, or alphabetical titles, or...
What you are struggling with sounds like more than a navigation problem -- it sounds like an information architecture issue. You have this big pile of content, and each piece looks equal. That's bound to be a problem.
Before you make a move, I'd suggest reading a bit about this field. O'Reilly has a good textbook, and WebMonkey has a good IA tutorial [hotwired.lycos.com].
The time will be well spent and improve your site-building altogether into the future.
I'm leary of relying on java for any kind of navigation, because I'm constantly worried about compatibility issues. The site at present has effectively two ways of navigating. Basic HTML HREF tags, and the java menu. You can navigate and find every page on the site without the JAVA menu working, by refering back to index pages. I use pretty basic navigation schemes for that.
It looks like:
Home__Fiction__Poetry__Web Tales__Serial-Novels__Forum__Contact__Links
across the top, with each title being a basic HREF to a sub-index page, where all the pieces available are listed, broken down by genre, author, etc. (or home page sub-sets, whatever)
The java menu is a "whiz-bang" add on so you don't have to go back to the index pages all the time.
The index pages will ALWAYS be there, because I firmly believe that if you make a page, you should be able to navigate it with Lynx.
What I was really looking for, was something that would give me the "whiz-bang" navigability of the java applet (and yes, its an applet, not a script), that wasn't so darned clunky on load times.
:)
Well, i have not seen your site and i dont know it this solutions fits in it, but is fast and efficient, as very standard,i mean almost every navigator (including lynx) can read it
In this page you can see a simple and useful menu at left
[meyerweb.com...]
In this pgae you can see a popup menus at top and right
[meyerweb.com...]
May be it is nox exactly what you are looking for, but could help, i hope so
:)
Bye
I think i should not pasted links in my last message
my mistake... really sorry...
if someone see my last message edited, the site i was tryng to recomend as a solutions is the MeyerWeb and the section is css / edge
Bye
I'll take a look at them. They seem to load quick, and may present part of the solution.
To be honest, I find this whole non-posting of links thing annoying, it really restricts the discussion. I can understand why the rule is there, and the reasons are valid. Doesn't make it any less annoying.
http://www.webmasterworld.com
or
[webmasterworld.com...]
That way it won't show as a referrer and at the same time is by far the easiest for other posters to paste because it does NOT have additional * or whatever.
What we don't want is links to your own "problem page examples" or links to small, unknown sites -- that's the kind of thing that gets abused by guerrilla marketers.
