Site navigation is somewhat bad
I find that the site navigation is unintuitive in certain areas.
Examples
Currently, the header/topbar contains the following items:
- Pronouns
- Dictionary
- Sources
- References
- Community
- Contact
- Account (will be @username when you're logged in)
For example, if I want to get to the blog, this is a theoretical example of what I'd look for:
- I look at the header - I see that the blog is not an item there, so I'll take a guess that it's on the Community page.
- I look through the items (Terminology, Inclusivity, Calendar, and Collective) - still no blog. Perhaps it's in the Collective tab?
- Whoops, it's not there. Alright, since I couldn't find it, I look through the header again and find nothing that I can intuitively link to a blog.
The solution is to go to the References page (which makes very little sense if any whatsoever), and then click the Blog tab.
Another example, if I want to get to the dictionary of terminology:
- I look at the header and see "Dictionary". It's probably there.
- Turns out, that page did not have the dictionary I wanted. Now I look at the header again, and I have a tossup between Sources and References, since those are the second-best choices. Let's go with sources.
- Nope, not in Sources either. Let's check References.
- References doesn't have it either?! What?!
The solution to this, which wrong-foots me every time, is to first go to the "Community" page and then go to the Terminology tab (which it does by default - hurrah for that). This is incredibly unintuitive - when have dictionaries been associated with community?
Idea for better site navigation
The first step for me is to group each page into parts that have something to do with each other. I'm gonna skip user pages here, since those are not linked to by the website itself generally. The editor is also already quite good navigation-wise.
These groups would be:
- For the Academics: Dictionary of gender neutral language, Dictionary of queer terminology, Dictionary of inclusive language, List of popular pronouns, and Nonbinary and gender neutral language in cultural texts. They're all about the language that we use, and definitions for that language. I've also placed the sources page here as it backs the dictionaries up.
- The Collective: The "Neutral Language Council" collective, Contact, and Blog. The first two are related to the collective itself, whereas the blog the collective publishes/makes/writes.
The pages that have not been grouped are Queer Calendar and Extra references. As for the calendar, the preview on the landing page is all that's required in my opinion. The link to Extra references should be moved down to the footer, since it's not the most important to be able to access.
Of course, these are just ideas - but something needs to be done about the current site navigation.