up

2009-07-21

Some reflections on, finally,getting
the new site up.
And why the navigation isn’t up-to-it.

going live

It’s finished—well it’s not really—but at some point you have to stop tinkering and take the plunge. So despite not being one hundred percent satisfied with the look and missing some vital functionality [proper navigation] I’ve decided that the time has come.

I’ll talk about design flaws etc. elsewhere, but for now I’ll explain why the navigation isn’t complete/useful.

can’t find things?

I’m very sensitive to navigation, I’ve endured never-ending nightmares with the navigation structure of my school site.

Navigation is something that hurts you [or your webmaster] if you get it wrong. You can [if you’ve been reasonably careful with the markup] change a bad design, but navigation? No, stuck with it. [Have a look at the exponential explosion that’s happened here—and they don’t update that regularly.] So I always give it a lot of thought.

For this site I decided that my main focus should be on my audience: who they are, what they come here for and how might they wish to get around.

who are you?

Having poured over my traffic stats [shedding hot tears over the scarcity of visitors] and what pages [of mine] Google search throws up gave me much to think about. And having thought I, think, that I can divide my visitor base into three general types:

  1. My coursemates, who enter via my current blog page and leave from same.
  2. Other OU students who have run across me in one forum or another who wonder. A quick tour seems to satisfy their curiosity.
  3. People who have Googled something like addLoadEvent and ended up in the wrong place. [My addLoadEvent is OK but if you’re getting code off me…]

There exists a sub-group—those who either Google tt### or students who want to know what I’ve written/thought about some course. I’ll assume that they really belong in groups one and two above.

As I’ve ditched all the JavaScript/articles nonsense we can, at this point, ignore group three above—which simplifies things.

so…

Most people come here knowing what they want, and they either know, or are Goo → oogled to, where to find it.

So I decided that a few links on the home page, a decent footer and a few landing pages would suffice for the majority of my visitors.

but…

Well so-far so-good, but at a late stage in the design I decided that:

I wanted to introduce a new section to the site, not exactly my old ‘articles’, but somewhere where I wasn’t constrained to discussing my current OU course.

Would that need a different kind of navigation? To which the answer would be yes.

Which is why I’m writing this rubbish and there isn’t a sniff of a decent navigation scheme—jings, there isn’t even a site search!