Hello everyone! So, here I am again trying to figure out a thing or two. I am making a website to show all of my software products and I basically need two things: ideas and solution suggestions. They got to be linked, i.e. at idea $X shall be linked suggestion $X and so on.
THE PROBLEM ------------------------ I want to get my design right from the start. I know I got to have a products link which will present my products when clicked. I have a couple ideas of how to accomplish this. One could be to use an accordion: I can have an accordion as sidebar and then several "selectable" items inside. Clicking on a selectable will issue an AJAX call to my, say, central form and present the data. I could have a collapsible panel instead of a form, well you know what I mean. Another one would be to use a menu and let the user select a product from there and then have, again, the titled panel or whoknowswhat to show off my product details. Problem with the menu is accessibility: if I use a "fixed" menu, i.e. writing the HTML for it in the page even if it's data driven in the backend, I'll have a messy and *large* HTML file. Using an accordion in this case would be imho a lot better because selections are basically list items and that's a lot friendlier to non-javascript browsers. Another alternative(I've seen this used on the JQuery UI site itself) would be to have an accordion with flat caption just like you do for the "View source" bit in the control demo pages. This is even better in some sense, because even if the markup is slightly more complex, in javascript aware browsers it will *not* need a side bar while in javascript unaware browsers it will still have "sense": accordions are headers and divs, something that non js browsers will love - and, no, I'm not just talking about blind people here, I know of a few users who just disable javascript. That being the case, I still want my site to be "usable", i.e. even if you can't use all of the features, still making the basics usable. Ok so these are ideas off the top of my head, anybody got a clue or suggestion of what I may be doing? Please keep in mind the only restrictions are: - Must make sense: I won't consider a tabbed approach because it might get cluttered as time goes, if you get to have a bunch of products how many tabs you got to have? It expands horizontally and that's a bad thing when it comes to an undefined number of tabs. - Must be themeable: I don't want to use widgets that will require a lot of work to be made theme compliant. I am a lone developer atm and I don't have resources(time and money) to get things fixed fast. - Must have users as forethought: What I am looking for is suggestions that will make user experience easier, not mine :-) I have no issue in working hard to make users' experience as positive as it can be, simply I don't want to get stuck on "stupid" things such as fixing widget to work with themes if you get what I mean. Given my scenario and restrictions, feel free to drop ideas as to what I could/should be doing to help users reach what they want :-) Thank you in advance for any pointers/ideas/criticism. -- Mr. Andrea Raimondi Senior Software Analyst&Developer -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "jQuery UI" group. To post to this group, send email to jquery...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to jquery-ui+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/jquery-ui?hl=en.
