HW: mission control

[M Holmes]

Arin Komins writes:

> Hi folks,
>
> Just to type in my 2 cents on this.
>
> Rik is the official webmaster for the band.  I think Alisa was right
> in asking to not rehash that battle.
>
> In general, rather than yelling at him over his site design, it's more
> useful to drop him email asking for changes (and explaining why.)

OK.

I'm a 'puting professional and very text-oriented by mental habit and I
think that's at least one reason why I find the site somewhat difficult.
I do find moving graphics distracting when I'm trying to read something,
but hell, at least we don't have popups. I'd guess there are also issues
on downloading time for some of the graphics stuff but it hasn't overly
affected me. Maybe if I read at home over a modem rather than staying at
work it'd be different.

What I do find difficult is finding what I'm looking for. As a
text-oriented person I kinda expect a Main Menu (Gigs, albums, lyrics,
news, pictures, whatever) and then gradually move down a tree (list of
albums or lyrics) until I hit what I'm looking for. At all times I
expect to be able to move down the tree until I hit a leaf of info; back
up the tree to the higher branch list and of course back to the
base/home page. It's good that the base page no longer fires up a
separate page that I don't want, but the navigation still seems to make
things difficult.

What would help is some kind of site map that would outline the
structure of the whole site and allow folks to just drop into sections
of it. I'm sure Rik would like to keep the look and feel of the SF
concept so why not have an overall "Galactic map" where solar systems
represent each area (gigs; lyrics; news; pics...), warping into a system
gets you a bunch of labelled planets representing sublists and moving to
them gets a planet and a bunch of moons wth sub-submenus. We all have
innate ability to navigate by map, so as long as there wasn;t a tendency
to reorganise the galaxy every few weeks that'd probably work.

I don't want to seem hypercritical though. It's good that the piccies
have thumbnails to click on and I think the basic structure is sound.
It's only the navigation stuff that's really throwing me. I'm also aware
that it takes time and effort to keep these sites up to date and I do
appreciate the work that's being done.

Cheers

FoFP