One of the kinds of feedback I saw from the recent broadcast letter on "We'd Like to Welcome You Back" is that some folks find it hard to get around on the site. I believe a part of that difficulty is that we confront them with four lines of top-level menu choices on each page. Thus I'd like to see us move in the direction of simplifying and streamlining where we can, and offering members a one-stop-shopping experience on the navigation of the site.
The following is a proposed site map page that reflects combining or reducing menu entries from 28 to 12. Before I do anything "rash", I would very much appreciate and invite feedback from the other moderators on what you like or don't. Perhaps if we're all comfortable, we might then post to our Greeter's group, for more of the same.
Please feel free and invited to weigh in here. I look forward to hearing from you...
Two examples of other sites that I find “cleaner/crisper” and easier to read.
I find our front page is too busy/distracting and the colour blocking used on the two examples above I found easier to navigate and read.
Our many tabs in the black bar above are too many…
Do we really need Leaderboards or Moderator Hall of Fame??
Maybe we do, but in my opinion our front page is not user friendly.
I appreciate your effort to streamline Red , I have no input on your site-map link just the comments above.
Thanks for doing this! : )
Mimi I've proposed deleting the Glossary and Events tabs entirely, and demoting more than half of the other tabs downward from the main level of the menu. I think I "get" your sense of the color blocking being easier on the eyes. The volume of material, however, seems pretty much the same for me.
We have several page layout template options in the NING native set. I may experiment with a few of them, as long as I can keep a trail of breadcrumbs to reinstate the original if we don't like what we see in the new ones.
Please take a look at our top level menu, folks. Consider this a first-installment on simplifying the navigation of the site. I wasn't able to get the number of tabs quite down to 12, but 16 is at least an improvement over 28. I will work with Rose to investigate more readable "clean" format templates for our home page, without changing the appearance to our members until y'all are satisfied that you like the outcome.
The only info that I've removed so far comprises our pages on "Glossary", "Events" and a page on member businesses.
The site isn't a terrible challenge technically. When I became a webmaster in 1990, one had to write all of the code by hand, one keystroke at a time, instead of using a graphical interface to build pages in the manner that we do today. The grounding I got in fundamentals has come in really handy now and then since, though I don't count myself an expert in Hyper Text Markup Language, and certainly not in Frames.
Mostly I simply do what I can to be of assistance to people who are laboring and in difficulty.