Safe Speed Forums

Paul, I think it's clear for everyone to see that you're putting a lot of hard work into Safe Speed. May I take the opportunity to make a suggestion about the site, though?

At tme moment, every page is named by its title - for example, /stevethomas.html. This works fine for now, and helps you to keep track of what each page is, but: how's it going to work out a few more months down the line? You'll have too many pages to keep track of!

I'd say it would be worth - at the very least - putting pages from different months into their own directory. So something like /2004/march/stevethomas.html.

Alternatively, how about looking into setting up some kind of content management system? I'm not sure how you'd go about it, but some form of SQL database combined with a PHP frontend would probably be the normal way.

Whatever you choose to do (perhaps nothing!), keep up the good work!

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-mike[F]
Caught in the rush of the crowd, lost in a wall of sound..

Hi Mike,

Yes, I'm very aware of these issues. I have looked at content management systems (CMS) and there are both advantages and disadvantages. One massive disadvantage is breaking thousands of links around the web to specific Safe Speed pages. Another is that it would become much harder to find a page by rememering its title - something that I do a few dozen times each day - and frequently to guide others on the phone.

The present structure has grown miles beyond the intentions of the original design, and I agree there are some problems. It isn't as bad for me as you guess, because I do have a subdirectory structure at this end. I like to keep the URLs short and logical for easy quoting, so dumping everything into the root of the web site itself is highly deliberate.

I'm more concerned about helping visitors to find the content they are looking for, and I have here about 4 different menu and index structures all of which have advantages and disadvantages. The next structural alteration will probably be the addittion of a user-optional frames based index.

A long term background project is a thing I call the "guide". It's a 3,000 word page with a description of the entire content with links to every other page. For those who want to try and read the web site like a book, this will provide the logical structure required to know how far you have dug into it, and also provides the chance to read everything. The guide is nearly ready.

Thanks for the comments and suggestions.

btw, I moved this message because I always intended this forum section for this sort of discussion. "Opinions" is supposed to be for folk to tell us how wonderful our approach to road safety is. I get loads of these by email, but few are intended for posting in public. I'd better do something better because part of the hearts and minds battle involves not having extreme or minority views. It's far too easy for the "antis" to dismiss safe Speed as fringe or mionority views.

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Paul Smith
Our scrap speed cameras petition got over 28,000 sigs
The Safe Speed campaign demands a return to intelligent road safety

Ah, that could be really useful. Anyway, nice to see that you've already thought about the issues I raised. I agree that relatively short URLs are easier to remember, so I guess I'll let you off! Also glad to hear that it's in a subdirectory structure 'at your end'.

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-mike[F]
Caught in the rush of the crowd, lost in a wall of sound..

If you are going to invest time in any sort of system to improve navigation then I'd put a text search capability top of the tree.

If you could search from any of the top level pages for text occurring in any of the pages it wouldn't really matter how the data was managed and stored...

Really? Oh dear. That's a failing in the navigation system then.

There is one and there has been for 6 months at least.

Look just under "quick navigation" on the left of the front page.

If you haven't found it, John, I wonder how many others haven't either?

Sorry all. I'll try harder.

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Paul Smith
Our scrap speed cameras petition got over 28,000 sigs
The Safe Speed campaign demands a return to intelligent road safety

Sorry Paul - in future I'll look properly! Of course it's as plain as a pikestaff now I know it's there!

In my defence, I would say that most sites stick them somewhere up in the top corner of the page. I didn't spot yours because I needed to scroll down to see it, so I guess I must have assumed there wasn't one before I put in enough effort to find it!

At the (not inconsiderable) risk of asking for another feature that's already there, how about a generic link back to the SafeSpeed home page from any forum page?

This is one of those little jobs that I hadn't got around to. Prompted by this I have adjusted the links so that the top left SS logo on any forum page takes you to the web site front page.

I need to do a bit more work in this particular area. I want to get a variety of web site links on the top of each forum page and I want to get the SS logo in the middle (where it's supposed to be)!

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Paul Smith
Our scrap speed cameras petition got over 28,000 sigs
The Safe Speed campaign demands a return to intelligent road safety

I'm not sure what you use to edit your site with, but a simple way is to add a call to a footer page in each page that uses javascript to display the messages link you want.

that way you only have to maintain the footer page if you wan to change the message and links.

for example on my webiste http://www.motorcycle-training.co.uk we have a quick navigator on every page so that those who come in directly can get to the rest of the site.

the code is as follows:
<script src="footer.html">

goes at the bottom of every page before the
</body>
</html>

then create a footer.html file with a load of
document.write('<INSERT_HTML_HERE>')
lines

where <INSERT_HTML_HERE> is the stuff you want to show.