Improve site navigation

[Chris Norton]

Currently it's a bit difficult to find some of the information on our site.  This is especially true when you have to first pull up an unrelated page just to get a sidebar menu in order to then find the page you're looking for.

Take the art project pages for example.  You have to first visit the Who We Are page and then click the "Art Projects" link to get to an orphaned section with pages.

My plan is to introduce hierarchical drop down menus in the top menu bar.  The sidebar menu links will remain on the pages as they are now but everything will be accessible from the menu bar drop down menus.

[Trina Lee]

That's a great idea Chris.  I feel like I know this site really well, and it's even hard for me to find info on our art projects page... even though I think I was the one to suggest that the art stuff be organized like that.   

[Chris Norton]

Research and notes gathered:

* Menu must be search engine friendly
* Need multi-level hierarchical menu capabilities

Dynamic Drive - Fluid CSS layouts

CSS Horizontal Drop Down and Pop Out Menu
Nice use of :hover CSS and almost zero use of javascript

burmees.nl HV menu

BrotherCake's Top Menu - via DynamicDrive.com

Accessible Website Drop Down Menu
The commercial version of Brother Cake's free Dynamic drive distro - free for non-profits like us

GRC's Script-Free Pure-CSS Menuing System
    * No client-side scripting of any sort (Javascript) was used
    * Absolute browser and platform compatibility
    * Text scaling friendly
    * Narrow window width handling
    * Functional for non-CSS, or CSS-disabled, browsers

[Chris Norton]

Wow - Google Custom Search Engine

We currently only have a search engine for the forum.  It's pretty good but Google is still better. 

Have a website or collection of sites you'd like to search over? With Custom Search Engine, you can harness the power of Google to create a search engine tailored to your needs.

This would give us a site-wide search mechanism for not only the message boards but all the other pages as well.  The beauty is that the search results are delivered to the user without leaving your web site (not taken to Google.com)

As a non-profit we can also have search results returned that are ad-free.  Go to:

United Way

and search for "community impact" or "Born Learning"

NOTE:  United Way is using the Google custom search to search across multiple web sites of theirs

[Chris Norton]

Okay - I couldn't resist trying it out.   

Here's a real quick and dirty test run of the Google custom search engine.  It needs more work to integrate the look and feel into our site and I need to adjust the engine to fine tune the returned results.

Burning Sky Custom Search

Try searching for "Aerial Art" or "eels"

[Trina Lee]

That's a cool feature.  I figure that anything you think is good for the website most likely is good for the website.   

[Ken Jobsky]

Chris - I gave the Google search a spin and love it. I searched for some obscure topics from the past and it works like a charm.

Good job!

[Sky (Mark Anderson)]

This is really awesome Chris. I've seen big business web sites less complete and thorough than ours. Again, awesome work!!!!!!
The one thing that still sometimes plagues me is when a post, like this one, gets by, and you don't know about it or any replies since you haven't seen it to be able to access the "notify" option so you'll get the following replies. I think this new "drop down" layout will help navigate thru posts so we'll be able to find a post we didn't get or somehow missed the first time.
Thanx Chris, uber awesome!!!

[Chris Norton]

The one thing that still sometimes plagues me is when a post, like this one, gets by, and you don't know about it or any replies since you haven't seen it to be able to access the "notify" option so you'll get the following replies.

There are already TWO ways to do this.  So this is mostly an education thing and not a navigation deficiency IMHO.

From any of our web pages, click the "What's New" link in the top menu bar.  That shows the last 12 topics with posting activity regardless of whether or not you've seen them.  This page exists for guests and search engines.

For a pinpoint accurate view of what's new for just you, come to the forum.  From there, click
Show unread posts since last visit.  It's at the top under our header and next to your forum avatar (picture) That link will return ALL the new topics and/or new replies that you personally haven't seen since your last visit to the forum.

[Chris Norton]

I've already been hard at work on some nagging layout issues and I'm ready to share a VERY preliminary preview of what I've got done so far.  For non-technical people, this 1st version really won't look any different than what we already have in-place with one big exception.  The layout now takes full advantage of your monitor space; it uses nearly 100% of the screen width.  This will be most useful for the forum and perhaps even more so for the image galleries.

New layout preview

This page is a snapshot of work in progress so when you look at it, things might not be working or even look right.

So far,I've re-worked the code that sets the look and feel so that it's MUCH easier for me to maintain and enhance in the future.  Think of it as replacing an old roof or foundation on a home.  The work doesn't look like much on the outside but means a lot on this inside.  I've also integrated the new Google custom search into the new layout.  The search results page, and all other pages for that matter, still need work.

[Trina Lee]

Cool!  I guess this means that you haven't been wasting all your time playing online poker, like last year.   

[Chris Norton]

Well I give up.  The free stuff I've found is much to complicated to be practical and the better ones are a real pain in the ass to work with.  I've posted a request to purchase a commercial tool so we can focus on content and usability without having our time sapped by trying to get delicate code working.

Two such commercial tools:

Plugin Lab Dreamweaver Extensions

Xtreeme DHTML Menu Studio