Monday, May 22, 2006

Construction Blog - 05/22/2006 - New Easy-To-Use Web Site Edition!!!

New Easy-To-Use Web Site Edition!!!

There are 18 registered users for bbn66.com but the only emails I've received have been from Lenore and Beth Jacobson. This sort of deafening silence usually indicates user interface issues. For example, people get lost somwhere in the site and don't know what to do.

Interestingly, the software employed to build this site is widely used. It's called wordpress. If you do a search on Google for "da vinci code" you'll get 170,000,000 hits. Do a search on "wordpress" and you'll get 154,000,000 hits. Thus both are very popular items. (The only difference is that nobody has ever heard of wordpress.)

With such widespread use, you would think therefore that wordpress should have its act together. But then you probably thought that Tom Hanks and Audrey Tautou had their acts together. Anyway, as we can see, the default setup of worpdress has its issues.

As we have no 2,000 year old secrets to hide, I decided to recode dear old weirdpress.

Here's what's new:

All hyperlinks are underlined. This will make it easier for you to see where you can go.

An important link is the title of the site. Click on the title at any time to return to the home page. (This is true for all well designed sites but many people don't know about this.)

Also a "Home Page" hyperlink has been added to the sidebar (menu on the right).

Probably the most important new element is that the sidebar is more persistent. It should no longer disappear and reappear as you open certain pages. Now it should always be there. Please let do me know if the sidebar disappears unexpectedly for you.

I hope this helps. Please let me know if you have other ideas...

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