Archives

DG mentioned last night that she had trouble trying to find an old post on Biggerboat. She didn’t know that the categories at the bottom of each post—i.e., “Blog” or “Reviews”—were links to category archives, and she said she didn’t notice the search box. While I don’t feel as if the site is that difficult to navigate, it did have me wondering whether anyone else was having trouble accessing any of the archived entries.

I’ve upgraded the search function to a Google site search and added links to the “Blog” and “Asides” archives (all along the left navigation bar). I could add links to category archives or even a monthly archive if people would prefer. Choose your own adventure! and let me know what you’d like to see with a well-considered comment below.

  1. I recommend you put the links to the archives with the three links you have at the top of the left column. You should then put the Search box below those. Users are conditioned to look in the visible window for a search feature without having to scroll.

    Secondarily, you could provide an Archives page that breaks out the different options for finding the information in different ways like I do on my blog and the others I designed.

  2. That better?

    My other question is, should I add the navigation bar to the individual entries? There’s no immediately obvious way back to the main site from the individual entries at the moment.

  3. Yes, as a rule you want to try to keep a consistent user interface. However, sometimes you don’t want to do this for a good reason. In those cases, you at least want to provide consistent navigation cues. Not sure how many folks know they can already click on your title banner to go “Home,” but adding the links would be a good addition. I thought you used to have them set that way.

    For pages I build, I try to keep the core navigation consistent and then drop surrounding features/items in and out depending on the context of the page.

  4. Oops… as for if this is better, I say yes, but that’s a question answered by your other users and especially DG since she brought it up! 🙂

  5. DG left a comment on September 1, 2006 at 1:07 pm

    It’s much better now. I can actually find stuff!

Comments are closed.