Web site - a refresh to improve navigation

For 2023 (and 2024 ...) - we are now fully retired from IT training.
We have made many, many friends over 25 years of teaching about Python, Tcl, Perl, PHP, Lua, Java, C and C++ - and MySQL, Linux and Solaris/SunOS too. Our training notes are now very much out of date, but due to upward compatability most of our examples remain operational and even relevant ad you are welcome to make us if them "as seen" and at your own risk.

Lisa and I (Graham) now live in what was our training centre in Melksham - happy to meet with former delegates here - but do check ahead before coming round. We are far from inactive - rather, enjoying the times that we are retired but still healthy enough in mind and body to be active!

I am also active in many other area and still look after a lot of web sites - you can find an index ((here))

With over 8000 pages on the web site, we're not short of visitors kindly sent by Google, Yahoo, MSN and friends ... but once they arrive at a potentially interesting article, they're all too often leaving again before exploring related material that could be of use to them.

The web site has grown over years and years and it's classified by "short articles", "longer articles" and date - which is the last type of categorisation you need if you're looking - say - so find out how to include an email subject line in a mailto URL, or how to get Internet Explorer to carry on a style between pages on printer friendly output.

These navigation issues haven't come to us out of the blue - I've been aware of them for a number of years and we've been categorising our articles and examples under discrete subjects too for quite a while - providing some help already with "more about this subject" questions. But from gently rocking the original site to accommodate these extra navigation tools, now is the time for us to tip it right over and have a much more context based navigation system.

Over the rest of this month, you'll see pages in the old style - with an identical navigation bar on the right and a lovely, but space-consuming image on the left, gently fading away ...

And in their place, a new design with more substantive and contextual navigation off to the right.

If you'd like to see some of the earlier pages that we've changed, have a look at an example on the horses mouth archive(Python), a sample training module's resources (Subroutines in Perl), and a top level page for a language for which I've chosen Ruby.
(written 2007-01-07, updated 2009-01-04)

Commentator

says ...

Web Design Ireland:

Great Article also menu bars, either horizontally or vertically, are the most common factors of allowing users to move through your site.

Your visitors need to easily be able to navigate around your site; if not they might get frustrated and leave. Also when your website is easy to navigate around visitors are more likely to return to finish reading certain articles that they were interested in, but didn't have time to read. Search engines also look at how easy your website is to navigate when they send their spiders in to crawl your site.

A more easily navigable site could help your search engine ranking, which we are trying to get.

Stephen
(comment added 2007-09-06 20:02:18)

Associated topics are indexed as below, or enter http://melksh.am/nnnn for individual articles

W501 - Introduction to Web Site Structure
  [332] Looking up IP addresses - (2005-06-01)
  [528] Getting favicon to work - avoiding common pitfalls - (2005-12-14)
  [1031] robots.txt - a clue to hidden pages? - (2007-01-13)
  [1168] Moving out some of the web site bloat - (2007-04-29)
  [1176] A pu that got me into trouble - (2007-05-04)
  [1198] From Web to Web 2 - (2007-05-21)
  [1431] Getting the community on line - some basics - (2007-11-13)
  [1636] What to do if the Home Page is missing - (2008-05-08)
  [1686] FTP - how not to corrupt data (binary v ascii) - (2008-06-24)
  [1969] Search Engines. Getting the right pages seen. - (2009-01-01)
  [2094] If you have a spelling mistake in your URL / page name - (2009-03-21)
  [2214] Global Index to help you find resources - (2009-06-01)
  [2282] Checking robots.txt from Python - (2009-07-12)
  [2552] Web site traffic - real users, or just noise? - (2009-12-26)

G900 - Well House Consultants - Miscellany
  [170] MySQL, Java, PHP and Linux - new technical articles - (2005-01-06)
  [201] 0870 telephone numbers - (2005-02-03)
  [333] Do NOT follow links or read attachments in these emails - (2005-06-01)
  [336] Targetted Advertising - (2005-06-05)
  [397] Where now for dial-up providers? - (2005-07-30)
  [636] What is your business latency and potential? - (2006-03-06)
  [1038] Know to the police - (2007-01-16)
  [1040] What the customer is looking for - effective training - (2007-01-17)
  [1183] Improving searches - from OR to AND? - (2007-05-11)
  [1867] Domain Renewal Group - (2008-11-02)
  [1898] Every cloud has a silver lining - (2008-11-21)
  [2019] Baby Caleb and Fortune City in your web logs? - (2009-01-31)
  [2144] Looking for a career change - Physician to Web Site Designer - (2009-04-28)
  [2258] Questions I have been asked on answering the phone - (2009-06-26)
  [2534] And now for some posts a bit more technical - (2009-12-12)
  [3000] Looking forward - the next 3000 - (2010-10-16)
  [3315] Friday - Electrician, Food Festival, C++ Course, Rail Group Meeting - (2011-06-03)
  [3612] Help to get online in Melksham - (2012-02-13)
  [3775] Alan Turing - 1912 to 1954 - (2012-06-23)

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This is a page archived from The Horse's Mouth at http://www.wellho.net/horse/ - the diary and writings of Graham Ellis. Every attempt was made to provide current information at the time the page was written, but things do move forward in our business - new software releases, price changes, new techniques. Please check back via our main site for current courses, prices, versions, etc - any mention of a price in "The Horse's Mouth" cannot be taken as an offer to supply at that price.

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