Petteri Pyyny
31 Jan 2008 12:17
AfterDawn's main navigation has remained virtually the same for almost a decade now. The familiar split between news, software, guides, etc has been an integral part of our site since the very beginning.
But for many, many years, we've received emails and feedback reports from our users (specially new users) saying that when you first time arrive at AfterDawn, it is really hard to understand what type of content the site has and where it could be found from.
Thus, about a year ago, we began planning a new way to organize the material available on our site. The idea to "tag" or "assign content to topics" has evolved to the new navigation bar you now see on the left-hand side of the page. It should be noted that we wanted to build the new "topic-based" navigation system independent of the main navigation, so that it wouldn't get too complex for new users.
We've went through thousands of articles, glossary entries, software items, etc and tried to assign them into somewhat logical "packages" that should ease finding the material from our site users are looking for.
So, there it is; our new navigation sidebar. If you like it or hate it, please tell us! And if you hate it, tell us why and how we could improve it. You can simply post a comment to this article and tell us here what you think about the new navigation element. If you do truly hate it, click the top part of it (the one marked with X :-) and it should disappear.
-Petteri Pyyny, webmaster
AfterDawn.com