Web site - a refresh to improve navigation
Archive - Originally posted on "The Horse's Mouth" - 2007-01-07 14:27:02 - Graham EllisWith 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.