New Tack with Navigation

I have been struggling with my image-based drop down navigation, as I have mentioned several times in this blog. Well, I am at the stage where I am re-reviewing the usability and I have decided to ditch the drop down menu all together. First, let me explain all my changes to the navigation:

1) Removed 'present travels': I reviewed the assignment brief and it says

Organise it as you consider appropriate but it should contain at least two sections:
i) up to the present (usually factually based)
ii) the present onwards (fiction, predictions or aspirations)

References had been given to past students who used 'past, present and future' but I was really trying to make that fit without good reason - I can only have been places, be one place and be going places despite spending 27 years of my life trying to work out how to be in more than one place at once!

2) Removed drop-down component all together. For a couple of reasons. First, moving "present" travels into "past" was going to start to create a very long drop-down. Additionally, while I may not have every place I have been to in the site in terms of content ready for submission with the assignment, I certainly plan to put this site live, and have it grow. I have been to 30 countries - listing each city would be a beast of a drop-down menu!

An article in the blog Smashing Magazine agrees - point 9. Paul Cormier over at Web Mastery Made Simple also agrees:

how often have you visited a site where you hover your mouse over the first menu element and sub-elements appear. Now you need to stop and think. Can I click the top-level element? Or is that just a place-holder to open the sub-menus?

The hover over was causing an issue, and further, I could not get the look and feel to the navigation I was seeking with CSS, and I set an objective not to introduce more complicated concepts to the webdesign.

Accordingly, the top level navigation is now all clickable and "past" travels and "future" travels each have their own landing page. On the past page - likely to be the largest at any time, I have used the spry collapsible panel functionality to enable cities to be categorised by each country. Presently each country only has one entry, but I will endeavour to change that prior to submitting the assignment so that it is clear why this functionality is relevant.

Bored of Photoshop? A cool website

Whilst I was looking for inspiration for the front page "newspaper" article I came across this really cool website that I wanted to share: http://www.fodey.com/generators/newspaper/snippet.asp you can create a very realistic looking folded newspaper like the one I did below:

Front Page Images

I have never had so much appreciation for the work designers do as after doing this course. All types of designers, graphic designers and web designers in particular - creativity takes time and skill! I have just spent days thinking about what the best home page images for my site will be - and coming up with the idea is one thing - designing it is the next! Let me reiterate - I am not a designer!!

But, with my limited photoshop skills, I am very pleased that I have just completed the first image for my homepage - the idea is a newspaper style image that 'explains' the site - I am not going home and will continue to travel. Here is a screen shot:

A Christmas Miracle

I have written and organised the content for 6 content pages on the site - phew! I just need to fix the main navigation and do and the social media footer and I will have something up for testing. Here is one of the pages.

Home page gallery sorted

So after the struggles of the other evening, I realised of course I was linking the wrong stylesheet to the new homepage gallery!! I now pretty much have the framework for the homepage. My aim this morning is to finalise the shape / template for the main content pages and then by the end of today get 9 content pages finished - 3 for the past, 3 for the present and 3 for the future!!! Here is the home page and here is wishing me luck on this Christmas quest today!

Tools for troubleshooting!

Never underestimate the benefit of getting another designer to run their eye over your code. Currently using skype to video chat while we look at the same code on a video conference!

Home Page

I am excited by the progress that has been made on the site, yet daunted by the looming deadline. I have moved on to the design of the home page. For ease of navigation through the site, the landing page should be a clear map to how to use the rest of the site. The vision is to remove the side bar and then create an enlarged gallery that echos the gallery on the main info page.

The bottom drop down feature should be replaced with 3 main images. One of these should lead to a dedicated video page - and lead to a selection of the best edited videos of my trips.

Well... we shall see.