We're getting close to making some fairly significant changes to the site home pages and navigation.
What we see from surveys, traffic studies, and anecdotal evidence is that many site users don't know about all the info that's here, and if they do, they have a hard time finding it. Add to that confusion of having two separate sites -- the community and the store -- and it just compounds the mystery.
We've been working on a solution for some time and we hope this is it:
- Combine the two sites onto one home page, with one set of navigation tabs for the store and the community
- Make the home page less dynamic (there are plenty of places to see what the latest content is) and more like a road map to help people quickly find the information they need quickly and easily
- By bringing the lesser-known content up to the top, we should get more, fresh contributions to it
- For those who do use the home page to check for the latest forum posts and such, we have added a new page called a "Resource Map" that you'll probably want to bookmark. It highlights the latest posts, newest owner mods, boat reviews, boats for sale, pretty much everything on the site that changes, all on one screen.
- No matter where you are on the site, you can get to any other part of the site with one click in the nav tabs.
We expect this will go live around March 1st (which, as anyone in IT knows, probably means sometime between April 15 and September 1).
Here are some screen shots of what it will like so you can get your head wrapped around it. The three different views show different content in the carousel at the bottom. There will still be separate sites for Hunter, Catalina, Mac, Oday, and Beneteau. In fact, there will be additional previews in that carousel for those sites. I'm just showing the SBO version because it's non-denominational.
What we see from surveys, traffic studies, and anecdotal evidence is that many site users don't know about all the info that's here, and if they do, they have a hard time finding it. Add to that confusion of having two separate sites -- the community and the store -- and it just compounds the mystery.
We've been working on a solution for some time and we hope this is it:
- Combine the two sites onto one home page, with one set of navigation tabs for the store and the community
- Make the home page less dynamic (there are plenty of places to see what the latest content is) and more like a road map to help people quickly find the information they need quickly and easily
- By bringing the lesser-known content up to the top, we should get more, fresh contributions to it
- For those who do use the home page to check for the latest forum posts and such, we have added a new page called a "Resource Map" that you'll probably want to bookmark. It highlights the latest posts, newest owner mods, boat reviews, boats for sale, pretty much everything on the site that changes, all on one screen.
- No matter where you are on the site, you can get to any other part of the site with one click in the nav tabs.
We expect this will go live around March 1st (which, as anyone in IT knows, probably means sometime between April 15 and September 1).
Here are some screen shots of what it will like so you can get your head wrapped around it. The three different views show different content in the carousel at the bottom. There will still be separate sites for Hunter, Catalina, Mac, Oday, and Beneteau. In fact, there will be additional previews in that carousel for those sites. I'm just showing the SBO version because it's non-denominational.
