« Site History

« Sea Lion [9] || Orange Lines [11] »

Run Time: None

Host: N/A

# Pages: 171

Tools: notepad, Paint Shop Pro 6.0

The Good:

• Global Navigation - with a site as big as mine, it's a very good idea. It had too many links but it was a step in the right direction.
• Better Navigation Menu - with the menu extending all the way down the page, it handled things like the large lists of poems much better.
• Sever Side Includes (SSI) - an old trick that lets you insert text files into the code of an html page. Saved me a lot of cutting and pasting time. Good to use if you're too chicken to tackle php.
• Underlined links - I stopped taking them away, but left them bolded as well. It's good when people can tell something is a link. It really is.
• Interlinking - the poetry section was big enough that I split its indexes up into multiple pages and made up for it by having similar poems link to each other. Time consuming, but worth it for me.
• Sitemap - compact and yet easily scanned through. I got it so right this time that I later used the same basic idea to re-do the writing page. And then I linked to it from every page so it could be useful. Wow.

The Bad:

• Bread Crumb Trail - a trail of links to all the indexes one would have to go through to get to the page from the home page. A complete waste of time unless you're running a site more like Yahoo!. Links back up to things could have gone into the menu on the right. Definitely usability taken too far.
• Samples - I started putting tidbits of things on the main index pages like part of a story for the story index. It only worked because I put links to content (poems, etc.) in the right menu and needed something in the main text area to balance it out.

The Ugly:

This was a large improvement on the layout before it, not because it was visually more appealing--I find it ugly in many ways--but because of the new things I started doing with it. I decided to make a prettier layout with the same ideas so this was never used.

Sections: