Site re-architecture proposal

[hepplerj]

The purpose of this re-architecture is to improve user experience, enhance navigation, provide more historical context, and streamline content for better accessibility. This is an evolving document. Note our current GitHub Issues, especially the user feedback from our user testing.

Current Website Structure

Navigation: Home, Blog, Database, Visualizations, About, Data

Pages:

• Blog: Contains individual blog posts; includes ways to filter posts by tag, category, or author. The current view provides a post's title, content preview, author, and date.
• Database: Underwent a recent redesign and re-architecture.
• Visualizations: Currently contains three visualizations. These provide a preview of the visualization, a title, and brief description. These take you into a separate page for an interactive visualization that includes contextual information and how to cite.
• About: A brief outline of the project and a list of the project team.
• Data: A table of datasets that links out to Github repos that contain the CSV files from DataScribe exports.

Proposed Updates

Navigation

• New navigation structure:
  • Home
  • Introduction
    • Context
    • About
  • Analysis
    • Visualizations
    • Essays
  • Pedagogy
  • Data
    • Database
    • Download data
    • Death dictionary
    • API documentation

Pages

• New or updated pages:
  • Home: Updated hero section that takes you to Context/Introduction, rather than the database or visualizations. New sections will be added or existing ones updated to take people directly into specific pages. Or, alternatively, the homepage becomes a large hero section only and pages are reachable through the navigation.
  • Introduction: Renamed from "About." Now includes drop-downs that are:
    • Context: A more general essay that introduces the historical context, explains the data, and can link out to specific contextual blog posts. Think of this as a "Getting Started" section of the site. This is where the new Hero section will take you.
    • About: This will essentially be the same as the current About page.
  • Analysis: This is a new tab and will have a drop-down that includes:
    • Visualizations: Our interactive data visualizations.
    • Essays: Rename "blog" to "essays" -- several users pointed out that these really are essays, and I suggest renaming this to be more in line with their stature.
  • Pedagogy: This is a new page for our pedagogical material.
  • Data: This becomes a drop-down with the following pages:
    • Database: We retain our current database page. We want to make a couple of changes to make things more obvious for users: 1) highlight more plainly instructions on using the table; this should maybe pop up as a modal on a user's first entrance to the page. We should also update the language here to provide links or explanation to things like calendar dates, parishes, or terminology. 2) make obvious that rows can contain additional data about a row of data.
    • Download data: This is our current data page. We may refine the view on this page, however. I have two suggestions here:
      • The table view works well, I think. But I would want to add two links for each dataset: a "View data on GitHub" link that takes you to GitHub's GUI of the data; and a "Download the data" link that takes you to GitHub's raw file. We can include a HTML attribute that prompts the browser to download the data rather than just take you to the plain text.
      • The data page can also link out to any specific essays that may help contextualize the data. Things like calendar dates, parishes, what is meant by "within the walls," etc.
    • Death dictionary: This will be a new page that includes the new death dictionary.
    • API documentation: This will be our current API documentation.

Visual Design Changes

• Design Updates: No significant changes to the color scheme, fonts, or current design. We will likely restructure elements of the homepage to take people directly into these new pages. I would like to re-visit that the color scheme, fonts, and images are all accessible.