{"id":464,"date":"2011-01-26T15:41:42","date_gmt":"2011-01-26T20:41:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/kyleclements.com\/blog\/?p=464"},"modified":"2011-01-26T15:41:42","modified_gmt":"2011-01-26T20:41:42","slug":"website-updates-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/kyleclements.com\/blog\/2011\/website-updates-3\/","title":{"rendered":"Website Updates"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve made some minor changes to my own website<\/a>, and some massive changes to the “Take a Picture”<\/a> website.<\/p>\n

Take a Picture<\/a> had a complete re-design with drop down menus, new content, lots of cool stuff, definitely worth checking out.<\/p>\n

As for my main website, my changes were aimed at tweaking some navigation issues that have been bugging me since last summer.
\n<\/p>\n

Over the course of the holidays, I had the chance to watch some non-tech savvy users navigate my website. I was watching for any signs of confusion or frustration.<\/p>\n

Nothing on my page was awful, but I knew I could do better with a little tweaking, I saw a few pages that could be simpler, and a few pages that were ignored because they were too subtle, too hidden from view.<\/p>\n

One of my own personal pet peeves when I visit a website is having frequently used information buried under a mountain of pages, or having pages hidden behind a wall of unintuitive categories.<\/p>\n

Sometimes, usability can be a struggle between super-minimal and easy for the uninterested majority, or super-detailed, but somewhat difficult to navigate and cluttered for the obsessive minority.<\/p>\n

My goal for this website is to cater to both sides. I want to have just enough info available on the surface to let people know my work without any distractions, but I also want a page that, with a little digging, hosts a wealth of other information for those who want to see more.<\/p>\n

I think I might have been leaning a little too far towards the latter in some places.<\/p>\n

The ‘gallery’<\/a> section is by far the most popular on my website. From there, people click an image, and most users are taken to the full ‘urban landscapes’ archive<\/a>, where they click on a thumbnail to see the image.<\/p>\n

But there is a problem with this arrangement:
\nMost people don’t want to see a full archive; they just want to see an image. I’ve set up my website so people have to click two buttons, then search around on a big long page for something interesting, then click a third time to see the image.<\/p>\n

What’s worse is how I’ve got the gallery section set up. Every link on that page leads to the full archive, yet there are 5 different thumbnails, so it looks like clicking a thumbnail should<\/i> take you to that image, not take you to yet another page to search for and click on yet another thumbnail.<\/p>\n

I should be able to do better.<\/p>\n

I have.<\/p>\n

Now, The gallery section displays my 8 most popular paintings, (as determined by you from the “vote for my paintings” gallery<\/a>) and a 9th thumbnail which simply says “more”<\/p>\n

Clicking a thumbnail takes you to that image.
\nThe 9th thumbnail, “more”, takes you to the full urban landscapes archive, which lists over 50 paintings in chronological order.<\/p>\n

So, that’s what I’ve been working on for the last little while.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve made some minor changes to my own website, and some massive changes to the “Take a Picture” website. Take a Picture had a complete re-design with drop down menus, new content, lots of cool stuff, definitely worth checking out. As for my main website, my changes were aimed at tweaking some navigation issues that … Continue reading Website Updates<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-464","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-website-maintenance"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/kyleclements.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/464","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/kyleclements.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/kyleclements.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/kyleclements.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/kyleclements.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=464"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/kyleclements.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/464\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":471,"href":"http:\/\/kyleclements.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/464\/revisions\/471"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/kyleclements.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=464"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/kyleclements.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=464"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/kyleclements.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=464"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}