Re: [WSG] Flyout menu questions
Hello Ron, and to other list members, My second comment to the list so have somewhat limited knowledge of best practices. I will be brief. I understand this is a test site and not compete in all details. I am not certain, but suspect you will have just as much depth in most other department sections as you did in the Community Development section. if so, you have problems of usability and user interest in pursuing to the depths. 1. The site is designed from the standpoint of the departments of the city - not from the true customers viewpoint. Ask citizens what they want to know and the site navigation could then be broken into perhaps 7-8 main categories that could be done as global nav at the top. An example is the staff listings - these are at best a vanity section and of minimal value. Either eliminate or group all under a catch-all main section like you might on a business website. A city is a business. Similarly - the forms for filing apps, refunds, making payments - might benefit from a common point of entry - right at the top. Your global Nav link I Want To.. might be the route, but that title leaves me wondering a bit what it really means. 2. The best-practices gurus say no more than three pages of depth - you're at five on the left side menus. That is too deep. I know it is possible to use the depth menu like this to jump to detailed sections easily, but I had serious problems with that menu nest in Safari, IE5.5, and NN7 on a Mac. I kept falling off the menu and having to start over. Nearly 75% of the time in trying to get to level 5 was a failure. The flyout menu failed totally in IE 5.5 on the Mac. It worked ok in Safari and NN7. 3. The one-size-fits-all website seldom does. I would advise you and your client to go for several websites - inter-linked of course, but distinctly different. Why? There is too much subdividing of data for the present portal site. You either have to back up and break it up into different sites - or break the data into different customer-oriented bits/sections. The separate library site is an example. 4. The global nav at top is a problem. In Safari and NN on a Mac the drop down for I want to.. appeared about 3-4 pixels down into the pale green section AND I could not reach them with the mouse before they disappeared. In IE5.5 on Mac the same menu appeared at the top of the white center section and was also impossible to reach with the mouse before it disappeared Will inline: SigThkLong200.jpg William H. Jensen, Jr. 67 Leninski Prospect Apartment #174, 5th Floor Moscow, Russia, 117296 Tel: (7)(095) 137-6546 [EMAIL PROTECTED] US address for mail forwarding to Russia is: William H. Jensen c/o IPS, MB 951 Suite 572 666 Fifth Ave. New York, NY, 10103 On Nov 8, 2004, at 9:58 PM, Pringle, Ron wrote: Hello all- I am in the process of redeveloping a large, content heavy municipal site. There is an extraordinarily large amount of information on the current site, and a large number of departments that need to be represented in the navigation. I've used the Son Of Suckerfish code to build out a flyout menu system. Works great, looks nice. However, some of the menus get as many as five layers deep. I'm concerned about usability (by regular and impaired users), especially on small screen real estate. My biggest problem with it is the depth of the submenus, how easy it is to slip off a menu 3 layers deep and lose your place and the fact that the menus don't remain visible for a few seconds after mousing off them. I'm looking for a review of the navigation along with opinions and suggestions, within the following constraints: 1. This site is templated via a single master template in DW. I would prefer NOT to have to use more than the one template for the site, as it will exponentially increase my workload with each additional section/template. 2. I've looked at the vertically expanding/collapsing menu systems, and have pretty much ruled them out for use on my site for a variety of reasons. Ideas, criticisms, suggestions and opinions welcomed. http://www.aurora-il.org/testsite/index.htm Only the first 3 menu items in the vertical nav have been flushed out. Regards, Ron p.s. for a good laugh, look at the current site at http://www.aurora-il.org ** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list getting help **
Re: [WSG] Flyout menu questions
Hi Ron, I've seen some pretty good menu system over at ProjectSeven.com Specially these 2 might be of interest... http://www.projectseven.com/viewer/index.asp?demo=tmm http://www.projectseven.com/viewer/index.asp?demo=mm2 They are quite accessible and degrades gracefully with javascript turned of. Kim Pringle, Ron wrote: Hello all- I am in the process of redeveloping a large, content heavy municipal site. There is an extraordinarily large amount of information on the current site, and a large number of departments that need to be represented in the navigation. I've used the Son Of Suckerfish code to build out a flyout menu system. Works great, looks nice. However, some of the menus get as many as five layers deep. I'm concerned about usability (by regular and impaired users), especially on small screen real estate. My biggest problem with it is the depth of the submenus, how easy it is to slip off a menu 3 layers deep and lose your place and the fact that the menus don't remain visible for a few seconds after mousing off them. I'm looking for a review of the navigation along with opinions and suggestions, within the following constraints: 1. This site is templated via a single master template in DW. I would prefer NOT to have to use more than the one template for the site, as it will exponentially increase my workload with each additional section/template. 2. I've looked at the vertically expanding/collapsing menu systems, and have pretty much ruled them out for use on my site for a variety of reasons. Ideas, criticisms, suggestions and opinions welcomed. http://www.aurora-il.org/testsite/index.htm Only the first 3 menu items in the vertical nav have been flushed out. Regards, Ron p.s. for a good laugh, look at the current site at http://www.aurora-il.org ** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list getting help ** ** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list getting help **
Re: [WSG] Flyout menu questions
especially on small screen real estate. My biggest problem with it is the depth of the submenus, how easy it is to slip off a menu 3 layers deep and lose your place and the fact that the menus don't remain visible for a few seconds after mousing off them. I think that's a big flaw in those menus in particular, that you don't 'remember' where you are after you've clicked on a link. What I've done is either use breadcrumbs to show location, OR use a common piece of code for the navigation that you can use to update the link images to reflect where you are (to stick, essentially). I'm looking for a review of the navigation along with opinions and suggestions, within the following constraints: 1. This site is templated via a single master template in DW. I would prefer NOT to have to use more than the one template for the site, as it will exponentially increase my workload with each additional section/template. Understand that, but you might end up being happier if you replaced the template with some common code include navigation so you have more control. I think the site looks great, but I prefer some sort of visual indicator on the individual menu items to indicate that there is additional content below. ** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list getting help **
Re: [WSG] Flyout menu questions
Pringle, Ron wrote: Ideas, criticisms, suggestions and opinions welcomed. http://www.aurora-il.org/testsite/index.htm I think it's to difficult to use for many visitors, flyouts are not so easy to handle for everybody! If you make Aldermans office and so on clickable, and point the links to simple menu-pages with the sub-choices, it would be a good alternative for users that have trouble with the flyouts. -- I do it this way myself, creating the submenus dynamically with Php. /AndersN ** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list getting help **
RE: [WSG] Flyout menu questions
Pringle, Ron wrote: Ideas, criticisms, suggestions and opinions welcomed. http://www.aurora-il.org/testsite/index.htm Hi Ron, I know this isn't exactly what you were looking for, but I went to do a quick navigation test via keyboard and found that I couldn't. You should remove the onkeypress redundancy for your style sheet switcher. As it stands, I can't tab past the stylesheet switcher because of the onkeypress handler. In many browsers onkeypress can break keyboard navigation - certainly an unintended consequence - where trying to help accessibility actually hinders it. Onclick is a misnomer, at least the way it has been implemented in browsers. It actually behaves more like onactivate, so onclick will be just fine for keyboard users as well. Hope this helps... Best regards, Derek. -- Derek Featherstone [EMAIL PROTECTED] phone: 613.599.9784; toll-free: 1.866.932.4878 (North America) Web Accessibility: http://www.wats.ca Personal: http://www.boxofchocolates.ca ** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list getting help **
