Easier Navigation on The Windows Blog with New Menu

This morning we deployed a brand new menu system to The Windows Blog. This new menu system is designed to make it easier to navigate the family of Windows blogs that live on the site. When clicking new “Blogs” button, a drop down menu for blogs appears which displays a categorized list of blogs. Blogs with long titles are also no longer cut off. 

image

Overall, the menu improves navigating the site quite a bit. And as we grow the site, it no longer made sense to keep a list of blogs on the left hand side as we had been doing before.

This is just the first of several more updates we’re hoping to make to the site before the end of the year!


Comments

  1. Posted on: October 05, 2009 at 11:56AM  

    Hi Brandon,

    Great to see your working to improve the blog. However, your navigation is completely broke in Google Chrome, and I guess (but don't know for sure) Apple Safari....

    With this and over 150 validation errors I'm not so sure if the issue is happening because of my browser alone, and I hope you all will fix the navigation sooner or later for those who browse with the webkit engine. I mean, if Apple Safari also is seeing this issue, and again, I can be wrong about this, but if it is, it isn't helping convincing them to move to Windows....

    Best of luck brandon, your doing a great job, just the navigation is now a big mess.

  2. Posted on: October 05, 2009 at 12:01PM  

    Oh, and under IE8 it looks good. However, it would be nice if the menu's have a little light-effect from solid blue to a little whiter blue. Currently it looks a bit to plain compared to the rest to the site... Thanks!

  3. Posted on: October 05, 2009 at 12:06PM  

    Peter van Dam, thanks for the comments! We'll look into the issue and try to resolve the problem with the new menu rendering incorrectly with Webkit browsers.

  4. Posted on: October 05, 2009 at 12:22PM  

    Hi Peter. I work with the dev team that revised the site navigation scheme. After checking Chrome (v. 3.0.195.124 on Windows XP Pro on my box) it appears that everything is working normally.

    You might try a hard refresh to make sure all the style changes are recognized and interpreted correctly by your browser. Also, if you can post some additional information about your system, we'll see if we can reproduce the issue here to pin down the root cause.

  5. Posted on: October 05, 2009 at 2:48PM  

    In IE8 works fine but in Opera does not work too well.

  6. Posted on: October 05, 2009 at 3:11PM  

    Please make all comments viewable on a single page and you're done.

  7. Posted on: October 05, 2009 at 3:20PM  

    Hi Jim,

    I've checked, but i'm still seeing issues with Chrome 4. Sure, I know it's beta, and maybe it's simply them to blame, but I do see improvements though....

    Right now, the very second I visit the site, the menu bar simply doesn't show up like it should be. It's like the CSS hasn't been loaded, so now things are just put on top of the site, not in the menus it should be.

    After a simple refresh or a visit to a other page solves the issue. Maybe it does know the css then, and renders it correctly. The issue must be something in there. I'll check tomorrow at work (if I have time) to see if I can repro the issue there and see if it's cache related.

    Keep up to good work!

  8. Posted on: October 05, 2009 at 3:21PM  

    Oh and jim, what are u still doing with XP, go trough away that trash, install Win7!

  9. Posted on: October 05, 2009 at 4:37PM  

    This has been needed for a long time, good job!

  10. Posted on: October 06, 2009 at 9:55AM  

    Ok, I cannot reproduce the issue i'm seeing here in chrome with the same chrome version at work (but with xp). So I guess it's a bit of a browser issue... Thanks again for checking out though!

  • Page:
  • 1
  • 2

Trackbacks

  1. Posted by: Twitter Trackbacks for Easier Navigation on The Windows Blog with New Menu - Windows Experience Blog - The Windows Blog [windowsteamblog.com] on Topsy.com on October 05, 2009 at 11:37AM

    Pingback from  Twitter Trackbacks for                 Easier Navigation on The Windows Blog with New Menu - Windows Experience Blog - The Windows Blog         [windowsteamblog.com]        on Topsy.com