[boost] [Website] Navigation and discoverability

Subject: [boost] [Website] Navigation and discoverability
From: David Abrahams (dave_at_[hidden])
Date: 2008-11-10 17:23:20

Hi all,

I still have a hard time finding my way around the website since it was
restructured.  I'm having at least two problems:

1. I can pretty much guarantee that manually changing a URL in the
   address bar of my browser will fail, I think because the URLs are
   deep and relatively unforgiving.  Unfortunately I have little or no
   insight into what would fix this problem.

2. Many files have version numbers in their URLs, and there doesn't seem
   to be any way to link to "whatever the latest is."  Also, once we
   have that shouldn't we try to encourage search engines to prioritize
   that URL as opposed to any of the many near-duplicates (not that I
   know how)?

3. I can't get a good feeling for what's on the site and how it's
   structured without hopping around all over the place.  For example,
   if I'm looking for mailing lists, do I want "community" or "support?"
   The answer isn't immediately obvious.

   http://www.boostpro.com has drop-down menus that are entirely done
   with highly portable CSS; I got the base code from
   http://www.cssplay.co.uk/menus/final_drop.html.  Something like that
   would be an immense help in finding what I'm looking for.

Thoughts?

-- 
Dave Abrahams
BoostPro Computing
http://www.boostpro.com