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The Megalithic Portal and Megalith Map : Index >>
Portal Talking Shop >> Ideas wanted to improve navigating and searching the Megalithic Portal
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Ideas wanted to improve navigating and searching the Megalithic Portal |
Andy B
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|  Posted 12-02-2010 at 13:21
Not everyone finds our search and browse interfaces easy to navigate but it can be difficult to see exactly something can be improved when you are very familiar with it works.
Any ideas as to how we could improve the navigation are very welcome, it is something I would like to work on. All suggestions welcome for new methods or interfaces people could use to search or browse for information.
Of course a text search that works is a good start and the Google one does that now.
Thanks
Andy B
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davidmorgan
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|  Posted 12-02-2010 at 13:29
I guess people are mostly searching for the sites themselves, so that should be the primary search. Maybe the next would be photos.
Perhaps with an "advanced" search for everything else.
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Andy B
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| Posted 12-02-2010 at 13:42
A couple of things I've already done:
Added red green and grey colour coding to the on-page maps, to match the 'classic' Megalith Map.
Red = We have a photo of the site
Green = No photo (please take one for us!)
Grey = Destroyed site (photos also welcome however)
I've also improved the Google Search box and I'll probably integrate it in better with the top-left search box
Remember that you can put UK grid refs, UK postcodes, US zip codes and German zip codes into the main search box to get a list of sites close to where you are.
[ This message was edited by: Andy B on 2010-05-05 12:08 ]
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Andy B
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| Posted 12-02-2010 at 13:50
A few ideas I have in my head:
To allow filtering of search and map results using the Access, Condition and Ambience ratings. A primary use of this is to show sites that have disabled access but there are many combinations you could put in.
Also a site-wide 'Megalith Map' again. The one we had was too ungainly to use and too difficult to maintain as a developer. Hopefully something along the lines of the Geograph 'clusters' map. (thanks Barry for the idea)
http://www.geograph.org.uk/mapper/clusters.php
(We have too many sites to just bung them all on one Google or Yahoo map)
Currently you do get a map of each country or county on the 'Browse' page. eg
http://www.megalithic.co.uk/search.php?query=&country=1&county=78&type=stories
This is one place I can add the Access/Condition/Ambience settings
[ This message was edited by: Andy B on 2010-02-12 13:51 ]
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Andy B
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| Posted 12-02-2010 at 15:07
We have a gallery search on the gallery page (I've moved it to the top of the page to make it more obvious).
But as with all these home made search boxes it has limitations. It blindly searches all the text and doesn't prioritise titles or suchlike. Also I don' t think it searches gallery comment text. The Google one is just better as they are slightly better at writing search engines than me...
[ This message was edited by: Andy B on 2010-02-12 15:10 ]
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Neolith
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| Posted 13-02-2010 at 12:35
Andy, Thank you for opening up the MegP site to suggestions and ideas. I've previously told one of your regular contributors, Angie Lake that I've found it difficult to use the site - she's prompted this post! - and I've been trying to work out what I've found difficult, because I can see that it can be a tremendously valuable resource for people who, like me, are deeply involved with prehistoric sites.
I should admit straight away that I'm not good with detail - I'm a concepts man  - and I've a low patience theshold! If I can't find something quickly, or information trails aren't obvious, I tend to switch off. My fault completely, but I can't be the only one and maybe you lose some of your potential constituency.
One of the immediate perceptions that I have as I visit the site is that it's "noisy". That is, there are lots of different visual elements all competing for attention. Links, images, advertisements ... and within each comment there are lots of different elements scattered around the actual post - different visuals, information about the contributor, and so on. Probably most of your users find this useful, but I find it very distracting - the blogs I tend to use are very clean and simple, with no distracting information.
Again, I recognize that this is my limitation, and I'm almost certainly in a small minority.
I've also considered what people use this website for. I've now come to the conclusion that it must be aimed primarily at people who want to visit a site and perhaps share their experiences ... but I've tended to visit it to find out hard information about a site, and I've often found that very difficult to derive. It's there, but you have to work hard to get it. An example. I've contributed a lot of material to the Eternal Idol website recently (under my real name of Alex Down) on Silbury Hill, stemming from a report I wrote on Jim Leary's presentation in Devizes. I looked in MegP for further information, but couldn't find any that was relevant to what I was thinking about. It was only this morning, when I was trying to crystallize my ideas on how to write this post, that I found that by getting the full list of images, I could find additional drawings of profiles, for instance, and other interesting information.
So a suggestion I have is that, for each site, you separate out the informative posts/images (those with hard archaeological and prehistoric information) from the, well, "touristy" stuff. I know this may be hard to do and not clear cut in many instances, but it would add a lot of value - for me, anyway.
I actually use the RSS subscriptions to monitor what's new on your site. For some reason, I'd missed the images button, and I've now added that, but what I've found is that, when a new and interesting topic comes up, there are no follow-ups. Other websites alert you to additional comment postings, but after an initial MegP posting everything goes quiet. If I was better organized perhaps I'd be better at following things, but I'm not, and I miss out on a lot!
So I have some brief suggestions. I'm afraid they may sound terribly high-handed but I offer them for what they're worth.
- Revise the appearance of the site and remove a lot of the distracting visual elements - "clutter"
- Consider the different objectives for the site - like providing visitor information, or an archaeological overview of each site - and decide how each may be best met (or even if one is not a proper objective for the site.)
- And make it easy for people to follow continuing discussions without having to keep visiting pages to see if anything new has been added.
I apologize if that all sounds very negative. I've tried to make it constructive, because I recognize what a hugely valuable resource MegP can be. And I know I'm probably not a typical visitor because of my intellectual limitations. But if it's not clear why I've made any one of the suggestions above, I'll be happy to try to clarify. Or withdraw it , instead!
Cheers
Alex
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Andy B
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| Posted 14-02-2010 at 11:45
Hello Alex, thanks for your thoughts, I'm ready for some criticism.
It is difficult to strike a balance between information and clutter. I must admit that many of us are fact freaks and love lots of links to external maps and searches. You could call the Random Image a very distracting feature but it's one of our favourites.
If you use Firefox I would suggest installing Flashblock which cuts down on visual distractions from Flash animations of all sorts without devastating our ad revenue from the text ads.
I will think about ways to present the various links better.
We limit the amount of photos that come up on each page so you do need to click to see all these. Some sites have literally hundreds so you wouldn't want them all shown each time.
Separating hard archaeological and prehistoric information) from the, well, "touristy" stuff
Do you mean the text or things like links to nearest pubs and so on?
Can you give me an example of another site or blog that gives good 'follow ups' as I'm struggling to see how this would work.
> And make it easy for people to follow continuing discussions without having to keep visiting pages to see if anything new has been added.
Can you think how could this be done? I know some forum software will e-mail you when your post is replied to. Could it be done with RSS? You could potentially have an RSS for each page but that's going overboard I would imaging.
I know a lot of people like the newsletter so perhaps more things that generate e-mails you could opt in to, like 'e-mail me when this page is updated'.
Anyway thanks, some good thoughts.
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Neolith
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| Posted 14-02-2010 at 14:14
Hey Andy, I'm really sorry that you feel that I'm criticizing. I know that comments like mine can appear negative, but I recognize that I'm at odds with most of your readers and contributors ("fact freaks") and I can see what a hugely valuable resource you operate. I really didn't want my comments to be criticisms - just an alternative, or minority, view!
I do actually use the FF browser with FlashBlock and other inhibitors, and I'd found that you have a theme called ExtraLite that I use because it minimizes the visual impact.
You asked for an example of blogs that have a comment update facility. The blog I know best, Eternal Idol, has an RSS button that allows you to subscribe to all comments added. There are not a huge number each day, but other blogs (for instance, Real Climate, in another discipline) can sometimes have literally hundreds of comments in a day, and the RSS mechanism seems to work well there too.
I imagine the EI blog must use some standard software to drive it, but the interface is very clean, and I get on well with it. The same is true of my other example, Real Climate, but neither of these blogs have large numbers of images to handle, as you do.
I do subscribe to another blog that allows you to request emails for subsequent comments, but I find this a lot less satisfactory. But if the RSS solution is not easily available this would be a good second best.
When you say "a lot of people like the newsletter" I wonder if you mean the blog itself, or some facility that I've failed to find? I looked for an emailed newsletter after reading your response, but couldn't find it.
As for the images, there are some wonderful pictures, and I'm sure they're very popular; but, taking Silbury Hill as an example, there are some gallery entries (some of yours for example, Andy, or Thorgrim's) that add a lot of understanding (even if it's through the comments added) while others are purely decorative - great pictures, but not generally adding to our archaeological understanding. Perhaps it would be possible for you - or, better, the contributors themselves - to tag their images or comments so that viewers could filter out the sort of information they're looking for? Off the top of my head - I'm sure there will be much better ones - we could use tags like Arch(aeology), Desc(ription), Visit, Art(istic), Spec(ulation), Land(scape interpretation) ... and so on.
Again, I'd like to stress that my comments are not meant as criticism - purely suggestions to make a great resource even more valuable.
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Andy B
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| Posted 14-02-2010 at 17:12
No problem. Instructions for the various ways to get the e-mail newsletter are here, are they clear enough to follow?
http://www.megalithic.co.uk/article.php?sid=2146412539
An RSS for latest comments would be pretty easy, (much easier than individualised e-mails), it's just another version of this page here:
http://www.megalithic.co.uk/asb_latest.php
Both of these links are in our horizontal drop-down menu along the top of the page, under News and Links, and Latest Entries. I wonder if perhaps you're not seeing this menu because you have so many things disabled on your browser?
Allowing tagging is a good idea, We could potentially allow tagging of comments and images in this way, and would answer your other point about 'touristy' vs 'archaeology' I will see if I can work out a way to do this.
That would be one way round sorting out 100,000 existing entries (comments and images). I wonder if there's much interest in people helping to categorise things like this?
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Andy B
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| Posted 14-02-2010 at 17:45
Here's a knotty problem to think about, where should we put new articles about Stonehenge?
1) Post them as their own page, which then go out in the newsletter, but once off the front page they get lost in thousands of other articles
eg http://www.megalithic.co.uk/article.php?sid=2146413673
or
2) post them in the hundreds of comments on the main 'Stonehenge' page where they are on the right page but still pretty difficult to find.
eg http://www.megalithic.co.uk/article.php?sid=157
Then they would come up in latest comments (if people are following this)
There's no easy answer - ideas to get around this make are welcome. Would tagging help?
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Andy B
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| Posted 14-02-2010 at 21:26
> To allow filtering of search and map results using the Access, Condition and Ambience ratings. A primary use of this is to show sites that have disabled access but there are many combinations you could put in.
I have now added this to the main browse and search pages, please give it a try and let me know what you think.
Cornwall is good to try this on as there are so many sites to plot. Here are sites in Cornwall with disabled access (access=5) and condition 5 out of 5
http://www.megalithic.co.uk/search.php?query=&country=1&category=0&county=13&sitetype=&days=0&condition=4&ambience=&access=4
Of course this relies on us having numeric ratings for all sites so please help contribute these (see the link in the left menu on the site pages)
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Andy B
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| Posted 16-02-2010 at 16:00
Alex,
I've done you an RSS for the latest comments and gallery comments. Give them a try.
http://www.megalithic.co.uk/latest_comments_rss.php
http://www.megalithic.co.uk/latest_gallery_comments_rss.php
Thanks for the ideas
Andy
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cerrig
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| Posted 16-02-2010 at 18:23
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Andy B
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| Posted 16-02-2010 at 20:26
You need to use an RSS viewer. Firefox works, or you can set them to feed a Google personalised home page or many other services
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MikeAitch
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| Posted 17-02-2010 at 15:28
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On 2010-02-14 21:26, Andy B wrote:
> To allow filtering of search and map results using the Access, Condition and Ambience ratings. |
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Very useful indeed. Would it be possible Andy to make the search wider like below?
Condition: any Ambience: any Access: 5
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Andy B
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| Posted 17-02-2010 at 15:35
It will do that, set the the Condition and Ambience boxes to 'All', set the Access selection box to >4, then press Update
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MikeAitch
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| Posted 17-02-2010 at 16:09
Cheers Andy, great way to plan a day out
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Neolith
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| Posted 17-02-2010 at 22:41
Andy, thanks for making the changes so that changes and additions to pages are notified by RSS. For me, it's transformed the usefulness of the site. It's a huge improvement. Thanks again
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Andy B
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| Posted 18-02-2010 at 15:05
Any more useful ideas, fire away...
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Andy B
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| Posted 06-08-2010 at 14:55
Steve Cooke writes:
May I suggest an addition to the site? Is it feasable/possible/likely (delete whichever is not applicable), to add a 'Sites visited' and 'Sites to visit' section to the members profile so that they can link in to the various pages. This could be viewable to other members for interest and also it might be useful to know who has visited a particular site so that, should it be difficult to locate, help could be sought from someone who has been there. Just a thought.
Many thanks for your help in this. Keep up the great work.
Regards
Steve
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