Reworking Andy's Personal Site - 2
Having arrived at the feel I want for the front page, I now need to rework the other top level elements of the site. I haven't reworked these pages for quite some time (although they're not as old as some of the lower level parts of the site). The problem that I have here, as you'll see from the length, is the sheer amount of material to which they refer.
There's a long list of pages, and that's not really all: the white boxes in the top right and bottom centre of the page are javascript pull-down menus. They were supposed to save real estate, but nobody much used them, so I stopped using them a couple of years ago. That does, however, leave me with a bit of a conundrum. Where to put all the links so that they don't swamp the page, but so that everyone can find them?
I'm going to put the main links into the left-hand margin of the page, and the lower level links on the right. This isn't really the standard way of doing things these days, but fie to standards. In English (or American) we read from left to right, so links on the left are "back in the bool", or "up", whereas those on the right are "further on in the book", or "down". (I'm aware that a web site doesn't really have a two dimensional map, but I only have a two dimensional screen). At lower levels, the "back" links will contain the high level page of which the current page is a member.
Given the nature of my site, I have a problem that many commercial sites actually have, but which many of them don't recognise: two completely different sets of users.
People who visit the robotics section of the site are mostly experienced surfers and in general they've been before and are returning to check out the progress on a particular project. These people need to be as few clicks away from the project as possible. People who find the "hanafuda" rules from a search engine, on the other hand, are normally new visitors. They need to be able to find what they want without getting confused.
Ideally, I'd present just four or five options in each list - that's the optimum for normal humans to make choices. That, however, would mean inserting another level of index pages below these four main pages, slowing down people who know roughly where they want to be.
I want to put the large photographs, around which the top level pages are built, on the right hand side of each screen. If I put a huge list of links in the top right, it will unbalance the page. Further down the site this will work fine, because there are normally only a few "down" links. But here, it will force the photographs of the bottom of the screen. I have to compromise
Taking a lead from the porn sites (who have to get it right or they don't make money), what I'll do is put the four most popular links in the top right, with a tag that takes the viewer down to the remaining links at the bottom, after the text. I believe that the metaphor will work for the lower level pages as well, but with their mastheads and margin illustrations, those will be a problem all of their own.