Your website navigation is getting worse

[fryke]

That established, I guess this thread _should_ be about the obvious concern of the user that having to go through 7 (is that number correct?) stages before submitting a question. Are these steps all necessary or can they be reduced?

[nuubie]

Originally Posted by DarkSorrow

The ads are there for a reason, those ads help to keep the website stay up.

If you dont like the ads, then there is a way to remove it. Firefox with Adblock extension can do this. i use it all the time

The last time I downloaded a major update the speed was over 1000 kb/sec. So its really fast. Its not the ads - its the design. I addressed specific points which nobody has responed to.

[Natobasso]

Originally Posted by nuubie

The last time I downloaded a major update the speed was over 1000 kb/sec. So its really fast. Its not the ads - its the design. I addressed specific points which nobody has responed to.

Give it time, grasshopper. The ONE PERSON running this site is pretty busy, but also dedicated to making the site as good as it can be. We'll certainly discuss more ideas here...

[fryke]

Also: Don't double post the same message again. Makes no real sense.

[Cheryl]

Here is a possible reason why you are experiencing trouble:

The data center, our primary server, is right now having data issues, things going up and down and that will cause issues as well. In addition, our fail-over system failed, because of the upgrade on Thursday to the human readable links setup didn't propagate correctly.

Needless to say, everything is kinda up in their air right now. The fact we are broadcasting today is a miracle in and of itself.

[ScottW]

Well, I appreciate any feedback on the site.

A couple of things in response.

1) Navigation. This is separate from a process. Navigation includes the ability to move around the site, ie, main menu bars and submenu items. I have made an effort to keep the navigation links in all the same places on the pages and to make it easy to get around. While everyone here might have a different take on what they would like to see, I think the navigation is 95% good. Always room for some minor tweaks.

2) Process. I will be the first to admit, that the process could use some work. What looked good on paper, ran into some implementation issues. In fact, I spent a really long time on building the a question asking process and it was the first thing I wrote when I built the new site, starting back in March. By the time I had completed the rest of the site, the newly built question ask process code was so outdated in style and approach, that I had to toss out the old code and redo it. So, I built it twice.

I ran into some implementation issues.

First, my goal was to build more of a smart system, one that could complete system details based upon little information, this would help users who where not technical to narrow their list of options. This was part of the Profile Builder. However, to database all that information and specifics was more than I could take on and I decided to axe for the current time, that automatic process, but the system is in place to support it for future use.

Secondly, the category selections where to be Javascript and they would allow you to select from various drop down options based on other drop-downs. The problem I ran into is it didn't work 100% of the time in all browsers and if a user had turned off Javascript, it didn't work. I thought I would try AJAX (and granted that was new territory for me) and I could get it to work (and well) inside all browser but Safari. Since I run a Mac site, I figured I should make things work in Safari as a priority. Because this was holding me up from meeting deadlines I had set for myself, I decided to go the sure bet way of making it work, let the server spit out new information based on selections. Granted, those automatic reloads are javascript but seemed to work better across all browsers and platforms, than some of the other code I had been testing.

Third, a simple Subject/Question form left much to the imagination many times when users asked questions. Sometimes it is like pulling teeth. The more information we can get out of users on the first round, the faster time to resolution.

Last but not least, I was attempting to change the way we approached incoming questions on the tech side and not put them by OS, but by category. I however, had to axe that part of it for backwards compatibility in the short term and it was easier to implement in the short term. So, in the end you have a partial implementation.

I think AJAX is the way to go on the categories, but I would need some help integrating that into my PHP to work on all browsers. Then, I'd just make one long forever scrolling question form.