With over 8000 pages on the web site, we're not short of visitors kindly sent by Google, Yahoo, MSN and friends ... but once they arrive at a potentially interesting article, they're all too often leaving again before exploring related material that could be of use to them.

The web site has grown over years and years and it's classified by "short articles", "longer articles" and date - which is the last type of categorisation you need if you're looking - say - so find out how to include an email subject line in a mailto URL, or how to get Internet Explorer to carry on a style between pages on printer friendly output.

These navigation issues haven't come to us out of the blue - I've been aware of them for a number of years and we've been categorising our articles and examples under discrete subjects too for quite a while - providing some help already with "more about this subject" questions. But from gently rocking the original site to accommodate these extra navigation tools, now is the time for us to tip it right over and have a much more context based navigation system.

Over the rest of this month, you'll see pages in the old style - with an identical navigation bar on the right and a lovely, but space-consuming image on the left, gently fading away ...
 
And in their place, a new design with more substantive and contextual navigation off to the right.


If you'd like to see some of the earlier pages that we've changed, have a look at an example on the horses mouth archive(Python), a sample training module's resources (Subroutines in Perl), and a top level page for a language for which I've chosen Ruby.
(written 2007-01-07, updated 2009-01-04)

Commentator

says ...

Web Design Ireland:

Great Article also menu bars, either horizontally or vertically, are the most common factors of allowing users to move through your site. Your visitors need to easily be able to navigate around your site; if not they might get frustrated and leave. Also when your website is easy to navigate around visitors are more likely to return to finish reading certain articles that they were interested in, but didn't have time to read. Search engines also look at how easy your website is to navigate when they send their spiders in to crawl your site. A more easily navigable site could help your search engine ranking, which we are trying to get. Stephen (comment added 2007-09-06 20:02:18)

G900 - Well House Consultants - Miscellany
  [3315] Friday - Electrician, Food Festival, C++ Course, Rail Group Meeting - (2011-06-03)
  [3000] Looking forward - the next 3000 - (2010-10-16)
  [2534] And now for some posts a bit more technical - (2009-12-12)
  [2258] Questions I have been asked on answering the phone - (2009-06-26)
  [2144] Looking for a career change - Physician to Web Site Designer - (2009-04-28)
  [2019] Baby Caleb and Fortune City in your web logs? - (2009-01-31)
  [1898] Every cloud has a silver lining - (2008-11-21)
  [1867] Domain Renewal Group - (2008-11-02)
  [1183] Improving searches - from OR to AND? - (2007-05-11)
  [1040] What the customer is looking for - effective training - (2007-01-17)
  [1038] Know to the police - (2007-01-16)
  [636] What is your business latency and potential? - (2006-03-06)
  [397] Where now for dial-up providers? - (2005-07-30)
  [336] Targetted Advertising - (2005-06-05)
  [333] Do NOT follow links or read attachments in these emails - (2005-06-01)
  [201] 0870 telephone numbers - (2005-02-03)
  [170] MySQL, Java, PHP and Linux - new technical articles - (2005-01-06)

W501 - Introduction to Web Site Structure
  [2552] Web site traffic - real users, or just noise? - (2009-12-26)
  [2282] Checking robots.txt from Python - (2009-07-12)
  [2214] Global Index to help you find resources - (2009-06-01)
  [2094] If you have a spelling mistake in your URL / page name - (2009-03-21)
  [1969] Search Engines. Getting the right pages seen. - (2009-01-01)
  [1686] FTP - how not to corrupt data (binary v ascii) - (2008-06-24)
  [1636] What to do if the Home Page is missing - (2008-05-08)
  [1431] Getting the community on line - some basics - (2007-11-13)
  [1198] From Web to Web 2 - (2007-05-21)
  [1176] A pu that got me into trouble - (2007-05-04)
  [1168] Moving out some of the web site bloat - (2007-04-29)
  [1031] robots.txt - a clue to hidden pages? - (2007-01-13)
  [528] Getting favicon to work - avoiding common pitfalls - (2005-12-14)
  [332] Looking up IP addresses - (2005-06-01)

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