Continued from part 2:

Data: what matters? Part 2

From the beginning, I envisioned the exhibit pages as being static. I wanted them uncluttered, and I wanted to be able to print them (I keep a binder of the exhibits I have posted). This fit nicely with my original concept for the website being a set of static HTML pages. Once I decided to use WordPress, I found out about “Pages” and felt they would work for the exhibits as long as I disabled comments on them.

When I first started experimenting with the website layout, I was not going to have the blog at all. Fortunately I realized the folly of this thinking, and set up the blog page and enabled comments on the blog posts to allow interaction with visitors. Then I had to put a link at the bottom of the blog post to the exhibit page, and later added a link at the bottom of the exhibit page back to the blog post to make navigation easier for visitors. I also added a “Back” button to the exhibit page for the same reason.

The last key element in navigation was what I was thinking of as “related exhibits”. For example, the first four exhibits posted were the four Old Timer Cars by Larami. Each car was its own exhibit, but I wanted visitors to be able to move between them easily. The custom field/taxonomy structure did not seem to fit, nor did the links want to fit into the table of interpretive information. I ended up placing a list of links below the table as I did with the link back to the blog post.

So what do you think? Is the website easy to navigate? Am I presenting useful information? Is the information presented clearly? Let me know in the comments!