Hi Benoit - (I will follow your precedent of top posting.) No, the
trouble with the current organization of the James website is that the
only way to navigate it is to use the hierarchical tree structured table
of contents that is found on the left hand side of the pages. This can
make it difficult to discover where a particular topic is addressed,
especially if/when that topic is found in a location that the developer
thought was appropriate, but not intuitive in the mind of a user. For
example, I wanted to discover what mailets are provided with James. My
initial guess was to navigate to the "User Manual" > Configure James >
Mailet Container and almost missed the tiny link provided/embedded at
the bottom of the page to the list of mailets. Then and only then did I
discover that this list was located in a surprising location under
"Developers Corner" which I had assumed would be topics strictly of
interest to James developers, not to users. (I am NOT criticizing this
particular layout, just using it as an example of how using a tree
hierarchy must be navigated, sometimes through many many branches, in
order to discover where a particular topic is documented.)
Using search engines can further complicate matters, especially on sites
such as James where multiple versions of documents are stored. One can
easily and inadvertently land on a document that is inappropriate for
the version of the James that he/she is using, and waste a lot of time
chasing a wrong answer. (I know, I have done it myself)
What a site map is/does is to flatten the presentation of an entire
website into a single page which contains links to EVERY web page
associated with that website. (including orphaned web pages which
sometimes crop up) That both makes it easy to see a high level view of
the entire website, all at once, and provides a lot of additional clues
as to the organizational model and where one may find documents on a
particular subject. One measure of the ease of use of a website is to
ask how many clicks does it take, to discover the answer to a question
or reach a goal on that website. A site map can reduce this to a single
click. Site maps are often used on large complex web sites and I am sure
you can find many examples. Also I have seen tools that develop a site
map automatically, some do it externally by chasing links, others do it
internally on the servers by chasing documents and directories also,
although these tools do have their limitations and shortcomings
especially if/when a web site serves dynamic content.
I am not asking that James use a site map in lieu of the hierarchical
table of contents it now has, just in addition to it.
Marc...
On 10/22/2016 11:05 PM, Benoit Tellier wrote:
Hi marc,
This is the landing page for james.apache.org
The Documentation link will point to today's james.apache.org's content,
achieving what you want. (Horizontal nav bar will allow to reach each
and every subproject documentation, and James logo will get you back to
the first page)
Were you suggesting something like this?
Regards,
Benoit
Le 22/10/2016 à 16:29, Marc Chamberlin a écrit :
On 10/18/2016 6:42 AM, Laura Royet wrote:
Hi everyone,
I have been working for a few weeks now on a promoting website for James.
Today, I would like to share with you my proposal mockup : please see
file attached in https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/JAMES-1837
The aim is to have this page as the James website home page.
In this way, a user interested by James (curious developers and
network administrators for example) will directly access tofundamental
information about the product and could try it thanks to the Getting
Started part.
He will also find quickly all the links to contact James Community.
And what about the current James website? Actually, the marketing
website menu bar contains the link "Documentation" leading to it.
For your information, I am currently working on cleaning the existing
website in order not to have duplicates with the marketing page and
also in order to adopt the same graphic charter.
Thanks in advance for your feedbacks.
Regards,
Hi Laura - May I suggest adding a link to a site map so that all the
all the web pages associated with and maintained by Apache James are
discover-able from a single point? The site map(s) should be organized
by version releases also, which is often the drawback of using Google
searches that can lead to finding outdated information..
Marc...
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