Since the soft launch a couple of days ago, I’ve had a lot of responses from the UNIMA Australia members; most of it good, but also most of it containing little niggly things that either need to be fixed or are due to helping people figure out the new stuff. It’s taken up a lot more of my time than I thought, but at least it’s been minor things that are easily solved.

In between responding to these things, I’ve been attempting to get more done on the SOP design, and although I am stuck in one area (the drop-down menus interfere with the main navigational links and I have yet to figure out how to show both without causing the main nav. link to either stop working or lose its colour change on mouse-hovering) I have at least been able to get the next drop-down menu started. It’s slightly different, because in this case, the ‘Tutorials’ menu link will be used in conjunction with a drop-down categories list (the other one is drop-down individual posts list). 

But I’m kind of stuck. Realising I need to somehow reduce the number of categories used, I’ve begun to rethink how to present them. The obvious choice is to collapse things down, such as getting all of the awards and reviews, interviews, employment opportunities into one events category - currently, they’re in subcategories or even in separate categories. But how do I present ‘Australian puppet sellers’ or ‘Aussie puppet companies’? Should they just be moved into the ‘Australian’ category (which is in itself under ‘World’)? Should I make it possible to only view puppet type categories, or split up definitions of puppet types from how to’s, materials, and so forth? Or allow both options? Do I stop using subcategories, such as the instance of placing ‘muppet-types’ and ‘ventriloquism’ under ‘mouth puppets‘?

It’s tempting to just try and figure this out later, since I won’t be migrating all of the posts at once. But then I have two additional problems: one, I then have to ensure that the drop-down menu looks good as the number of categories scale up; and two, that’s what got me into this mess in the first place. Adding more categories as I go just makes for more confusion, not less.

The most obvious thing is that it is better to allow people to navigate per puppet type, since most people are interested in viewing a subsection of puppetry, not having to search through posts of blacklight puppetry to find something on marionettes. But it would also be more useful to separate the materials/tools posts from the definitions, or the how to’s and patterns from book reviews.

Is it possible to create different ways of displaying the categories? I’m not sure. The blog platform is certainly flexible enough to do it, the issue then becomes finding a way to present it clearly within the new design and layout. In trying to find suitable examples of drop-down lists, I came across this page which describes ‘mega drop downs’, where designers are using similar menus to mine to create easy-to-navigate but huge lists of links. Grouping links in such a way seems the obvious answer, but it still leaves me with the question of how to group the categories.

One thought I had is to present top categories as: "world/location – puppet types/definitions – how to’s/patterns – materials/tools – performing/staging – tips and tricks/design and inspiration" (such as with the Action Envelope design at the link above), and then have subcategories after that. Even then, it’s possible the drop-down list will be too big to fit easily on the screen without interfering with the rest of the navigation.

… Of course this is not to mention that the sites displayed above are most likely hard-coded, and not created using ‘on the fly’ plugins that comes with the blog software. That makes it very difficult to customise each link, unless I hard code it: increasing the likelihood of having to spend a lot of time editing any changes in.

And then there is the issue of popular topics, such as puppet companies in Aus, or whatever. Most people from searches will end up in the right place, so that’s not a problem. But if you wanted to find an article like that coming from the home page, it might be tricky to find in amongst the categories list; although I guess, that’s what the search function is for (whether people have the brains to use it or not).

I don’t quite know what the answer is yet, but I wish I had some card-sorters to help me out. It’s very difficult to know what will work best, when I’m used to seeing how everything is structured already, and can’t guess at the improvements that drive-by readers and regulars would find useful. 

So if you have any suggestions on how to reorganise the categories, leave a comment or two. An outsider’s eye would be very helpful at this stage.