November 24th, 2009 • by David Zatz
Allpar is a big site, with over 1,700 pages. Long ago, when we had just hundreds of pages, we put dropdown menus onto the top of each page.
My latest research using Google Analytics shows that these menus might not be used all that much. It’s hard to tell for sure – maybe there are parts of the site where they are used more than others. But it’s beginning to seem like there’s no reason to have them.
So would you miss the dropdowns if I were to replace them with a row of links to key areas of the site? You might have to drill down through more pages to find what you want, but that might actually be easier than the current system.
Please say, yay or nay, so I can weigh. Thank you.
November 19th, 2009 • by David Zatz
Those using Internet Explorer 7 may have noticed a sudden change recently – if they have a narrow screen.
Over time, we’d phased in a style that restricted the width of the window, for two reasons. First, it helped to reduce oddities with images appearing in the wrong place; and second, it made it easier to read the pages. We tried to get a balance between an easy-reading width (where narrower is, up to point, better) and image size (where wider is, within reason, better).
Internet Explorer 7, though, has some peculiarities, one of which is that when you set the maximum width, it also takes that as the minimum width. So now, after a rather long delay, we have an automatic script in the header which sees if you’re using Explorer, then sees if your window is narrow; and if it is, it will replace that style with an automatic-width style. The result is that Explorer 7 people can see the pages the same way Firefox, Safari, and Chrome users have seen it… which is to say, correctly. (I believe Explorer 8 fixed this problem, and Explorer 6 wasn’t good enough at CSS to have it in the first place.)
At the same time, we figured out how to reduce the number of ads showing up on the top of the page so they wouldn’t be crazily crowded together. We haven’t figured out how to center them yet, but give us a few more years and we might figure that out too. This second change affects people with just about any browser.
Meanwhile, the news page has two plug-ins to provide a better experience for smartphone users. iPhone and Android users, in particular, will see a much more appropriate page for mobile phone users.
If you haven’t already seen it, we’re also transitioning over to YouTube for our video needs. When we start producing new videos, we can have higher resolutions and less compression; it’ll look better. (This is largely a matter of policy changes at powerTV).
You may have already noticed the new, faster-acting menus. At some point we’ll try customizing them for the section you’re in.
Our changes may not be as sweeping as Chrysler’s, but we’re still moving forward.
