Having played with the new page format a bit I have some feedback.

The new format is easier in someways, but I've noted some problems.

First off, it's confusing. There are too many places to get information and people
have to keep clicking on different tabs to find what they want. For example, I've had
several people email asking where they can find the release schedule. (This came
up because last weekend was the Deerfield River Festival, and since that is one
of my rivers people were sending me email wanting to know what happened to
the release schedule. It used to be the very top of the page.)

Also, the places we (as streamkeepers) put the majority of the information are in
the River Info, Gage, and Rapids tabs. These three tabs should be the first ones
at the top.

Note that in some cases we've written the descriptions to have a logical flow.
In the previous page format the gage info came first, then the river description, then
followed by the rapid descriptions. Now with the new format the order is different;
this is going to require going back to many of my rivers and rewriting things. (Not
that it won't be worth it in the end, but it's still going to be a lot of work.)

One issue with the multiple tabs, is when I switch tabs and the go back it has to
download the info over the network again. This is real pain; when I'm reading
about a river I may switch tabs back and forth several times. I kinda expect that
the initial page load might take a while, but once it's done and I start reading it
I (as a user) don't want to end up waiting again. This is the typical whizz-bang
feature that techies think is so great but really just makes it more unfriendly to
the typical user.

Another problem is the "gage" tab. This is a bad name since many rivers don't
have gages but instead are release controlled. It's not obvious that someone has
to click on the gage to see the schedule. (For one example of this problem look at
the page for the Deerfield River in Mass: [www.americanwhitewater.org] )

A better name for the gage tab could be "flows" or something similar. Or how
about an optional extra tab called "Release Schedule".

I would also add a couple more tabs with info that is sometimes buried in other
places; there could be a "Technical Details" tab if you wanted to split the info from
the description page. There should be a "directions and local info" tab with written
info that sometimes is in the river description.

I would suggest that the tabs somehow be grouped into three catagories:
Main Info (River Info, Flows, Rapids, Technical Info, News):
Logistics Info: (Local Info & Directions, Map, Weather, Guide Books)
User Info: (Photos, Wiki, Comments, River Network)

Make them into three separate (or differently colored) rows to make it easy
to distinguish.

Other comments:

The stylesheet has changed which has messed up formatting. I really wish this
wouldn't keep changing because I now have to go back and figure out what you
changed and make corresponding changes to many of my rivers. This is made
more difficult for me since now when I view the source I only see source from the
main page and not the other tabs; so I can't always figure out what you've done.

The formating of pictures in rapid descriptions has been messed up. Now each
picture is displayed with the width of 320 pixels (as before), but the table (or
whatever) was put in with a "div" and takes the entire width with blank whitespace
to the left of the picture.

Also, the titles of the pictures are displayed in a bigger font and color then the
name of the rapid they are part of, plus the picture titles are aligned left while
the pictures are aligned right. This is just visually wrong.

Sorry to bellyache so much. Just wanted to point what I thought were issues.

thanks
/Skip

Skip,

This is all good feedback.

On the releases we've had several discussions on this.

Check out how it's displayed on the Feather:
[www.americanwhitewater.org]
Do you think this works? Our thought is to have a little calendar icon on the right.

For this to work you need to enter the releases as events on the calendar (and this is where we could use some help from volunteers who know the local schedule).
[www.americanwhitewater.org]

By entering in the calendar we can set it up so releases for a river are linked to the river page, releases for a region are visible from the regional page, and all events are visible from the events page. Being able to provide the information through a database-backed system allows us to serve it in different ways and avoids having to manually update individual pages (more of an issue where we don't have an active StreamTeam member).

Best,

Tom

Thomas O'Keefe
Pacific Northwest Stewardship Director
American Whitewater
3537 NE 87th St.
Seattle, WA 98115

425-417-9012
okeefe@amwhitewater.org

>Check out how it's displayed on the Feather:
>Do you think this works? Our thought is to have a little calendar icon on the right.

Not really.

The sidebar is ignored by most people since they have been trained that it's
a holder for more general information, advertisements, and other stuff that is
not directly related to the information they are seeking.

Since you're split up all the river info into separate tabs, the only place to put
release information is in one of the tabs.

Also, with rivers like the Deerfield (Monroe Bridge with 32 releases/year, Fife
Brook with 106 releases/year) you do really need lots of space, it would get too
clunky on the sidebar to be visually readable.

>For this to work you need to enter the releases as events on the calendar (and this
>is where we could use some help from volunteers who know the local schedule).

I can quickly enter a schedule into an HTML table, but entering each release as a
separate event (when there are a lot of them) is going to take more time then I
want to spend. Not something I want to do.

(For a full list of New England releases and to see what we're up against look at:
[amcbcc.cnc.net]
There is no way in the world I want to go thru a event screen to enter all this info
one at a time.

/Skip

Thanks for the feedback Skip. I agree with the tab grouping. I am entering the suggestion as an enhancement. The CSS is a tough thing to deal with. I don't know how to handle that. Ideally descriptions could be written using standard headers, paragraph tag, and image tags, table tags, etc... but I know that isn't likely. I am trying to reduce the reliance on the sidebar for everything but ancillary information. AW will be giving fair warning before any major site updates in the future.

Ryan