Site Navigation 2009:
All of our Departments (excepting Humor and Recipes) have been converted to WordPress, and navigation from the right sidebar is easy and intuitive. This page offers a good overview of site organization and the navigation choices you have as you visit our pages.
We do plan on keeping some of our old HTML pages, either because they are legacy pages, or in some cases because their format doesn’t fit into a conveniently suitable WordPress schema.
Summitlake.com grows a little larger and more complex every year. Navigation has really become easier, so we’re scrapping our old “Site Map” page. In its place, we’re offering this simplified, illustrated, 6-step guide to help you find any page out of over a thousand on this site.
Overview: Organization by Department
Summitlake.com pages consist of an index (“HOME”) page, and several assorted categories of subindex pages. We call our subindex pages “Departments“. Departments include
[What's New has been absorbed into HOME and is no longer a separate department].
Under each Department may in turn be found numerous articles, essays, photo postings, recipes or other features relevant to the Department’s topic or theme. These may number from a few articles to hundreds.
Some of the larger departments may be further broken down by subtopic. The Writing department offers sublistings for stories, poems and Bear stories, for example.
Root Level: Pages that apply to all departments
The “root level” of any computer directory tree means the highest level. “About” pages, copyright and credits notices, and author’s profile are examples of pages that are found at the top HOME (root) level of Summitlake.com. Note that these pages are generally only accessed from the home index page, or, in some cases, from the blue Tigra Menu navigation bars.
Navigation Devices
Below, we list the most common ways you can easily navigate around this site.
1. Tigra GOLD Menu- Root, Department and Page levels
These nifty navigation aid appears nearly everywhere on the site, including at the top of this page. Hovering your mouse over a heading title reveals the drop-down submenus. Submenus with an arrow contain more submenus. Tigra GOLD menus appear on all the WordPress pages, and some of the updated HTML pages. Tigra menus give you tooltip hints (descriptions), and they also give you the link’s URL in the browser status bar (bottom).
HTML Pages on their own do not usually have Menus. You can tell when you are in a WordPress page because the address bar will show a /WP/ in the directory name, and the page will show a .php extension. (HTML pages usually have a .html or .shtml extension. Recipes and Humor use .php pages but are not WordPress.)
2. At A Glance – Root Level
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Here is a picture of an “At A Glance” listing, found on the HOME page. Here you can tell instantly when we last updated any of the listed major Departments or most popular pages. This feature is updated automatically and instantly every time we post a change to any page or department shown. For example:”Bug List” is a page. Date shown is the date the page file was last modified.”Commentary” is a Department. Date shown is the date any page within the whole Department was last modified. |
3. AutoList Menus and the Department Level
AutoList is one of the most important and easy-to-use HTML nav features of the whole site. Since the results of a whole directory are too large for a WordPress page, at this writing (March 2009) you can only see it in RECIPES and Humor menus.
4. WordPress department index pages
All of our departments have been converted to WordPress index pages, complete with links to feature articles. Newer articles of modest length are usually written within the WordPress framework. Major new feature articles, and a 10-year archive of all older legacy articles, are sometimes still written in the traditional HTML format.
To index the entire HTML article archive, click the “blue glass” Index button on the WordPress index page, when it is offered. (Try this one below):
5. HTML department index pages
Offered in Humor and RECIPES, AutoList generates links for every department level page where it is used. NOTE: many older pages have been converted to WordPress. If you are looking for a page you know you saw before, and can’t find it in AutoList, use the Search field in the page’s WordPress department.
WordPress Departments still having many legacy HTML pages also sport a blue “Index” button” to make it easy to browse those pages.
Sometimes, the linked page will replace the page you were viewing. This is fine if the page you are now viewing is also Summitlake.com’s, but, if Yahoo’s, viewing somebody else’s site from within one’s own site is a no-no. We now try to link all pages to the “outside world” in new browser windows, but some of our older pages do not do that yet.
6. WordPress Sidebar Browse Features
Refer to right sidebar menu on this page for examples. All WordPress sidebars in our departments offer most or all of these options.
- We offer “Browse By:” links to search by Most Recent and Articles by Category
- Use the Archives popup to select all of the articles for a given month/year.
- Use the Categories popup to select all of the articles for a given category.
- Use the Search field and button to do your own custom search by word or phrase.
- Look for links for Departments, Links (offsite), Pages and other link categories. Link categories are customized in each department.
- Tags are listed in the “Tag Cloud”. A Tag is similar to a category, but is individually assigned to each page or post. Tags function more like “keywords” that you have seen elsewhere. The larger the font of an individual tag appears, the more posts have been assigned to it.
7. “Posts” versus “Pages”
Unless a contributor is actually creating content in WordPress, there is no particular reason why a user should care whether content was created as a Post or a Page. Nonetheless, WordPress evolved different and not entirely consistent options and display methods for each class of content. The Page links you see in the sidebar are created automatically. Post links appear automatically in the various search tools: Month, Category, Most Recent, Recent Posts, Articles and Search results. Manual links can be created for both posts and pages, which are called ”Permalinks” for items of permanent interest, and because their link address never changes. Hope this helps.
8. Standalone Pages – Pages Without Departments or Menus
Once you’ve begun to appreciate and get used to the Department page organization, you’ll click one of our page links that is already in a new browser window. Or, you’ll find one page on our site from an external link, perhaps from a friend, or Google. First-time visitors viewing a single page may never be aware of all the features our site offers, unless they explore the links on that page.
What happened to the supporting Department and Menu format, and how do you get back to it?
This is the old browser “new window” problem. That is why, in a minimalist move across all WordPress departments, we have finally deleted the code in every link tag that caused a link to be opened in a “new window”. 99 percent of all users know what the “Go Back” button is and how to use it.
In other words, as one commentator put it regarding the
"target="_blank"tag, “Some web designers think their sites are so important that any external link must be opened in a new browser window”.“However, no amount of clever (or stupid) tricks will change the fact that forcing new windows to open is disrespectful and hostile to web site visitors. A number of usability studies have shown that experienced web users will find this behaviour annoying and that beginners will get confused by it.”
We’ve come to agree with this. At this writing we’ve tackled all the remaining legacy HTML pages as well. With the exception of slide show article links and built-in link functions, there should be few “new window” links left on this site. ”Frames” create the same problem, in a different way.
Frames: The huge Recipes and Humor departments were actually just huge frames browsers, which caused users difficulty getting back to the content they were originally viewing. Those departments have been converted to non-frame CSS/Javascript technology that gives back navigation control to the user. We still have many legacy framesets for browsing very large multi-page articles (notably in Commentary, Computers and Writing).
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