>From: "Gert Driesen" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> >Sent: Tuesday, March 15, 2005 2:37 AM
I'm sorry I didn't get to this sooner, as I come down on the hate side of hierarchical menus that Troy mentioned, at least for home pages. The problem is that hierarchical menus encourage large menus with many entries. And that makes things harder to find and less accessible, not easier. For comparison, take a look at the Cruise Control page at http://cruisecontrol.sourceforge.net/index.html . This has between 11 and 15 items, depending on which ones are expanded. On the other hand the last proposed NAnt page has, if I counted correctly, about 70 items when fully expanded. The other advantage of the Cruise Control site is that the selection items are nice, large buttons - which makes it much easier for people who either have wrist pain for whatever reason or mice that are acting up. This doesn't necessarily mean getting rid of the idea of a hierarchical layout on the home page, but I do think it needs to be much, much simpler. My basic design philosophy is that home pages need to be targetted to the people who never or rarely come to the site. Experienced, frequent visitors will bookmark the pages of interest (which effectively allows them to create a customized hierachical menu) or figure out the fastest navigation paths. So may I suggest putting yourself in the place of the new user, and try to optimize the page for that person. Create a separate, sub-home page for contributors, and just have one link to it from the home page. Remove everything else that's only of interest to contributors. Move the link to the introduction to be the first thing under the documentation heading, not buried under User Manual. Combine the Releases and Nightly Build sections under one heading, called Downloads (because that's the jargon most commonly used, and hence the one that people expect to see). But besides all that, I think the single best thing that could be done is to put a direct link to Tasks, Targets, Expressions, Functions, etc. on each and every page of the online manual (not the entire web site). The idea is that whenever you're looking at a specific task, it should be one click to get to the function index, expression page, etc. and vice versa. Just my two cents, wholesale, for what it's worth. Gary ------------------------------------------------------- SF email is sponsored by - The IT Product Guide Read honest & candid reviews on hundreds of IT Products from real users. Discover which products truly live up to the hype. Start reading now. http://ads.osdn.com/?ad_id=6595&alloc_id=14396&op=click _______________________________________________ nant-developers mailing list nant-developers@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/nant-developers
