Work in progress - comments welcome

[kendalcottages]

kendalcottages website is not presently responding. I will try a in a few days as I do not visit this forum every day.

Yes, unfortunately we had a hardware failure at the week. Hard disk has now been replaced, backup restored and now all working as normal again. Sorry 'bout that.

[CSE]

Garri
You insight to the world of web design is super. You obviously have a great talent. I will look up birdboxx and all the other information you have talked about here later. Whether I can take all that technical talk on-board is something else. Thank you.

I love reading through the websites that others put up here for review. And I am ashamed to say I am scared to add mine for review

kendalcottages
Yep the photos work well. Some great shots of the fells, in all weathers. I used to have relatives living in Grasmere and one house was once used as a holiday home for all of the family, so all your photos bring back memories. One Aunt still lives in Windermere.

Seeing your galleries makes me think I should review my photogalleries and think about using something else other than the Simpleviewer I use at the momnet.

[Windy]

Paul

I love the site in general but I do agree that it would be better centered - I have a hi-res monitor and the right hand side of screen is a vast empty desert of unbalanced nothingness.

I also think a banner at the top would be more attractive and satisfying to the eye than the text.

2 years ago, after a review of my own site I converted to right hand side navigation. I resisted Garri's advice for a while but it's ergonomically much more efficient. (Put your mouse away for a moment and force yourself to use a laptop trackpad (eugh!) to get a more exagerated experience).

When you look at Kendal for example, the list extends below the fold so that once the page has reloaded you have to scroll down - move to the right, scroll, move back to the left - see what I mean?

Of course that doesn't mean left hand nav doesn't have it's place, even if only because it was/is the norm.

The facilities page has a column of text that feels too narrow to me - I'd be tempted to shrink the photo and widen the text column

I like the thieves checklist (oops inventory) but worry that it might be an invitation. Mind you we got turned over a month ago so I am a bit paranoid. I send an inventory out with the arrival details on final payment.

I LOVE your idea of putting key events next to the booking dates - can I pinch it?

The planned wealth of local information is fantastic - I love that and think it is tremendously important.

All in all a briliant and well executed site and you place looks stunning. A real credit to you and the huge amount of effort you must have put into it all.

[Garri]

2 years ago, after a review of my own site I converted to right hand side navigation. I resisted Garri's advice for a while but it's ergonomically much more efficient. (Put your mouse away for a moment and force yourself to use a laptop trackpad (eugh!) to get a more exagerated experience).

Glad you saw the light, Windy. And yes, that's a good piece of advice: try visiting one's website using a laptop's trackpad. It's not pleasant, even the beautiful ones are a chore!

Whilst I love Kendal's useful information and the stylish left nav bar in general, I think this is a case against using vertical navigation regardless of whether it's on the left or right, as there's too many options which disappear below the fold, and in the example of 'Kendal' that list extends even further.

I've made this same mistake with our Go Glamping site but rather than waste time and resources changing it now, it will have to wait until the next major design revision of the site in the summer.

But if I was designing the site today, it would look totally different.

Going back to Kendal's site, it might be worth exploring other navigational techniques. One I'm seeing growing in popularity is what they call 'mega drop down menus'. Here's what Jakob Nielsen has to say about them: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/mega-dropdown-menus.html

One of the site's I'm currently studying makes great use of this: http://www.epicurious.com/

It has dual use, as you'll see when you hover over any of the horizontal nav items. Then look what happens when you click the little down arrow. I think this particular solution works well as the site is colossal in terms of content, and variations of content.

This may be overkill for Kendal's site, but there are growing examples of more pared down versions for smaller sites.

We're currently experimenting with this technique for all of our current websites, and future ones, with our own custom WP plugin (it won't be available publicly, sorry)

We actually want to do away with using sidebars for navigational elements completely.

[Windy]

Very interesting Garri -the mega drop downs looks like it could be quite useful if only I knew how to code one - any pointers to CSS tutorials?

"putting the most important and/or frequently used group on top (in a vertical design) or to the left (in a horizontal layout, assuming a left-to-right language like English). "

Maybe this helps to explain the tension between the left (importance) and right (ergonomics) thing with menus?

I find that epicurious site a bit scary and confusing though Too many choices of ways to navigate - I only realised the arrows functioned the way they do because you pointed it out - it's not intuitive to me.

[Garri]

"putting the most important and/or frequently used group on top (in a vertical design) or to the left (in a horizontal layout, assuming a left-to-right language like English). "

Maybe this helps to explain the tension between the left (importance) and right (ergonomics) thing with menus?

Not sure about that, could be. I'm quite heartened that Jakob Nielsen has given it the thumbs up as he's a hard man to please, and as you know, conducts loads of usability studies.

I agree about Epicurious, it's not intuitive but it was one of the first to use this technique, or at least one of the first I noticed!

But I don't see any other solution for them considering the size of their site.

How to code? We're in throes of developing an in-house plugin that will take much of the work out of coding this but you can find loads of articles on mega drop down menus if you do a search.

The ever trusty Smashing Magazine has a showcase of sites using drop downs: http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/03 ... practices/

Tutorials:
http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2009/03/ ... th-jquery/

[Windy]

Thanks Garri - I'll take a look - Sorry Paul - we seem to be deviating fromdiscussing your site a bit. Apologies for the TC.

[Garri]

On the contrary Windy, I think this side discussion could prove useful for Paul. Just wish I'd launched Go Glamping 4 months after I did!

I'm now convinced, that vertical navigation for Paul's site is not appropriate given the amount of information and content he wishes to present.

[Windy]

And I'm having the same thoughts about my own site.

I can feel a bit of mucking about coming on.

[Garri]

John, you might find these 2 links interesting in regards to WordPress 3.0 (due in March?)

Read the first bit sub-titled 'menus':

http://wordpress.org/development/2010/0 ... ch-sprint/

They're incorporating the custom menu system from Woo Themes:

http://wordpress.org/development/2010/0 ... ch-sprint/

Not sure it will do the job for my specific requirements but an exciting development nonetheless.

Edit: The public beta for WP3.0 is March 15th, with May 1st seeing the full release: http://wpdevel.wordpress.com/version-3- ... -schedule/

[Windy]

Interesting

I'm not sure how it will integrate with the Aahualpa Theme Manager that I am using on a couple of my sites though Garri.

I guess Wordpress is fast becoming the weapon of choice though. I think If I were starting from scratch again I'd be starting there now. Havng said that being kicked into learning some CSS / HTML hasn't done me any harm in tweaking WP anyway.

[Garri]

John, if your theme already has a menu system built in then great, if not you will be able to use the custom menu builder which will be built in to the core of WP from 3.0 onwards.

Yes, WP is currently our weapon of choice and we're already planning to make use of custom taxonomies for the new HP, and I believe WP 3.0 will also launch custom post types - which will be highly useful too!

This alone will help WP become a proper cms and not just a blogging system that has been hacked as a cms (if you get my point)

We're now holding off the relaunch of HP until WP3.0 is out and has settled down a bit.

[Garri]

From time to time I scour various design resources looking for talented individuals who can help me with my sites. I recently came across this chap's website:

http://madebytim.com/works/time-tense/

I love the simplicity of it generally and his overall style, but I particularly like the way he has rendered his navigation on the left. If you click on the bold headline such as 'News and Info' and 'Contact' you will see that he uses a nice Jquery accordion effect to show and hide the options.

What's also nice is the way it stays fixed in one place when you scroll through the site.

The advantage of this technique is it ensures his navigation stays above the fold and is omnipresent when looking through his site.

In this case I feel his decision to place the navigation on the left works, in my opinion.

[kendalcottages]

Thanks for all the feedback on the site and the ensuing discussion on types of navigation. It's been really helpful.

I am sorry not to have got back to you sooner, but I've had my head buried in work, be it the day job or ensuring that everything is ready for us welcoming our first guests on Friday. Putting that folder of information together about how to operate various appliances, etc. isn't half tedious but I think I might not have the necessary qualifications required for writing instruction manuals.

I am not ignoring the comments but for now I'm going to keep the navigation as it is and focus on getting all the content in that I want to present. There's still quite a bit of work to do in that regard so I need to focus on getting a website that is complete before I explore better methods of presenting all the information, I think.

Thanks for all the comments. They have been really helpful and have been taken on board even though I've not yet acted upon them.

[kendalcottages]

I forgot to say... I've put new photos up at http://www.kendalcottages.com/photogallery.htm - they're not the final ones I plan to go with, but they will have to do for now.

I think I should be able to get a much better shot of the balcony when the trees aren't looking so sparse and, if I'm lucky, maybe I can get a bit of blue in the sky, too.