SCN: SCN site and logo redesign

[Rod Clark]

> ... I have heard nothing but complaints about the current
> system. Complaints came from topic editors as well.

Patrick, 

   There actually are some reasons why the tree menus are harder
to work with, and have been off-putting to topic editors
compared to the "one enourmous page per topic" menus that we
used to have. 

   First, you can't always just append something to one fixed
page. You have to look through the menu pages to find where it
should go, because we have an expandable menu structure now.

   And it's not just that there are more menus. It's also that
there are now a lot more headings and many more detailed
sub-headings to deal with in each topic area, even for the same
number of links. These take additional time and thought to think
up and organize, significantly more so than the earlier style of
making long lists of more loosely related links under fewer and
more generic headings on one long page.

   It is mentally harder and more time consuming to extend the
more fine-grained categorization system more frequently and in
more detail whenever you add links. When I'm tired and I just
want to add a few links, I don't like to have to deal with that,
and I'm sure that neither do others. But it does help viewers,
who can quickly scan the comprehensive and comparatively
detailed page-top sub-heading menus on each page. The new site
has a much better granularity of categorization, and I think
giving that up would make things harder to find on the menus,
not better.

   But adding each new heading to a page is more difficult now
becauase of having to add a page-top heading item corresponding
to the new heading in the body of the page. The Open Directory
has automated programs to allow editors to add items more easily
from Web forms, and lately there are various purported "EZ
portal" systems out there as well. But we don't have any of
that, so it can be tedious to do this.

   Then there are cross-references, which we never used to have.
They're a very good addition, but they also take some care and
thought about when to use them as well as with their format.
They're another thing that has to be done in a consistent way,
and are one more thing about the new site that isn't as easy as
pushing a button when making menus.

   When moving a long and growing list of links under a heading
to its own menu page, it's necessary to give some thought to how
to subcategorize that lengthy list so that the new menu page
isn't just a long list of undifferentiated related links that
tend to make visitors' eyes glaze over from wandering up and
down through dozens and dozens of undivided line items. To allow
future expansion of the new menu and to give visitors as many
clues as possible to the content of the page, you need to create
enough subheadings to group the links into easily understandable
subgroupings based on more specific differences between the
sites on the page.

  This is a speed bump when adding a new page to the tree menus.
Doing it is a chore because you have to subcategorize a whole
new menu page into some number of new subclassifications that
were all lumped together before, and you have to invent those
extensions to the classification system all at once before you
can proceed.

   These are only some of the little things that when added
together make it noticeably more difficult to maintain a more
highly structured, more highly categorized, more expandable and
more highly cross-referenced site, compared to the simpler and
less thoroughly indexed site that we had up through 1999.

   Ken alluded to some not very well chosen subhead titles. And
there definitely are some, and I've done some of them. We're not
using Library of Congress classification, or Dewey Decimal
classification, or the AIRS social service classification
(though Mel Guest and I did each look at that). It's basically
just an empirical description of found objects. It could be
improved in quite a few places, and Ken and others here are
welcome to review any of the categorizations to improve them.

Rod Clark

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