I notice that the menus on Landships II are growing to the point of being unwieldy.
For example the German artillery menu is so long you have to scroll to see all of it.
When I converted the old freeservers.landships website I kept the high level organisation of the website and made it uniform across the website.
It seems to me that:
1. I could split the pages to shorten the menus, say for the artillery articles, add a new page for WW1 mortars and migrate all the articles on mortars to the new page.
This will delay the problem with the menus.
2. Alternatively, we could go with an organising system like www.ammsbrisbane.com - a hierarchical menu system - this would fix problems with
site growth for a long time. The only problem is that the AMMS website uses JQuery - eventually I'll have to hand the running of Landships II over to someone
else (biology may intervene) so I'm concerned about using complex frameworks that are difficult for the amateur HTML hacker.
I'd really like some feedback/opinion on this. I don't want to just arbitrarily make changes without the community's input and agreement.
If you have a website you think does a good job organising its material please post it here. I make no claims to be an HCI (Human-Computer interaction) expert, the
current website is logical without being outstandingly easy to use.
Hi Charlie I think simple is best, for me that would be splitting into categories either by calibre or type of gun as in your example 1. for mortars, using the current format... that said I dont feel the list is unwieldy as yet.
I agree with Ironsides. Whilst I am not finding the current set-up unwieldy, if one wanted to divide up the larger pages, doing it by type would seem logical. For example guns could be divided into Pack/Mountain, Field, Howitzer, Mortar, Ack Ack, and so on. Or by calibre, I suppose, also makes sense.
Will this be just a problem for guns? Even the British tanks wouldn't fill up more than say, 12, is it? Model kit reviews seem to be already divided by manufacturer, and I can't think of another numerous category.
To me, the site is great as it is and better than many others around. If something is difficult to find, usually a quick post will elicit the place of the required information, but I take your point about it growing over time.
Even in my own computer, the Military and Modelling folder (10,2GB and nearly 33 000 files) is being redesigned because sections get too unwieldy (for instance, now separating out breech-loading arty from muzzle-loading arty) and unexpected finds mean the growing of what was before a fairly small section. Since joining Landships, I've had to re-organise my AFVs into 46 folders for WWI alone and 99 in total, but designed so that drilling down is easy and it is easily expanded either by adding a new country or a new AFV as a new folder.
Assuming we keep growing at the current rate, what is the anticipated size in, say, 10 years? How much of a problem will that be? Is there a direct correlation between growing membership numbers and the web site's size?
Finding interested and committed people is always a problem, never mind the competence to look after a web site.
Drilling down from a main heading to sub-headings is easy and most probably the way to go. Perhaps we need to limit the size of a particular topic (Helen's fascinating MkI mobile coffee table pages will get considerably bigger before the thing is finished!!!) to make them less unwieldy?
Anyway, whatever the solution, a massive vote of thanks for all the work put in.
