Navigation Clean up

Hi, James, the new default style (water) is really nice.

But the navigation area is still too big for my taste. The problem is with the height (you have to scroll a lot to see all the options) and with the organization of links / sections.

Some ideas to improve the usability of the site:

- Categories could be displayed all together using different font size to indicate how many articles contains, this kind of visualization is used in a lot of blogs and news sites today, is very compact and more comfortable than a combo box.

-The "Categories" and "Categories Syndication Links" combo boxes are confusing. One way to display a link to the category feed could be showing a link to: "Subscribe to the posts on this category" at the top when the user is displaying a category.

-The search box should be at the top, not at the bottom. And "Title" "Body" checkboxes are superfluous: if I want to search for "usability" in your blog I don't knwon if this word in on the title or in the body, so I think that in 99% of cases I'm going to check both: title and body.

-The images of "Download" and "C|Net Download" are confusing: what I'm downloading? With a really small change you can produce more click through: Simply make an image that say "Get VisualWorks Smalltalk" and other that says: "Get BottomFeeder" (maybe a pair of arrow down images in some complementary color with the legend like the ones used in the Ruby On Rails site, is enough)

-Feedster is confusing too. I don't knwon what Feedster is... so I don't known what does this search box. Anyway probably an user that uses Feedster already has a bookmark or a search option for that site (if it's using Firefox), so I think that is better to delete that feedster box. (unless you receive money for each Fedster search that comes from your site ;-) )

-The "News and Documentation" section should be in the VisualWorks site. Maybe a link to "VisualWorks and ObjectStudio Documentation" is better.

-The background on the Events section could be white so the small logos of the events will look nice. Also centering the logos should made the displaying more pleasant.

- The new "Powered by Smalltalk" logo is really nice. But is better if the image has some rounded borders or other background color... maybe a gradient from a light gray to white, because the white color on the purple background is too rigid an made me think on an Ad published from other site.

Comment by James Robertson

Water is not the default - you must have selected that eons ago. The default is actually something called 'cst'. To change that, use an url like this:

http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/blog/blogView?style=cst

Thanks for the other stuff though, I'm always interested in feedback.

Speaking of styles, you no longer let the user chose the different styles, except on the "Add comments" page which has the original Style and the old, old menu layout.

I also agree that the "Downloads" button is confusing.  At the very least, the "Downloads" button should be moved from the "About Me" section (since the user is not downloading James Robertson) to the "Smalltalk Stuff" section (where having the button makes sense, since the button takes you to a page giving you the option of downloading a version of Smalltalk.) 

You might want to use the new "wave" icon instead of the old "RSS"  icon for RSS feeds.  Also your "Subcribe" section could be a little clearer.  For example, "Blog with comments" instead of "RSS Comments" and "Subscribe via Bottomfeeder/BlogLines" instead of what you have now.

Other than that, what you did was a good improvement. 

Comment by James Robertson

Steve, I made the changes you suggested (other than the RSS icon, which I'll get to)