07 September 2016: Miscellaneous Site Updates

I was using my Nexus 7 tablet earlier today to poke around this website and was shocked and amazed to see how difficult the menu system was to navigate using a touch screen on a tablet or phone. The problem was that the top level menu items for the most part all had links associated with them which makes it challenging-to-impossible to select a sub-item on a touch screen. I mean, good luck. This is not a problem with a Mac or PC using a mouse because you can hover over the menu heading and then click on the link you want in the drop down menu

FIXED: now only those main menu headings with no submenus (currently only Home and Branch Pond) have links associated with them. The rest require you to select a page from the drop down list. To get to this news page for example, you can touch (or hover over) the News main menu heading and then touch (or click) the first item on the list, News and Comment. I don’t think I dropped any pages in the process, but if you see something missing, let me know.

While on the subject of site updates/changes, I’ve also added the current water level to the top right side of the screen, right above the search box. Because I can. It gets updated automagically whenever I update the water level charts which is usually daily around 7:30 am this time of year. The lake level is currently at -67.80″ below the top of the dam. You’ve never seen it this low.

9 thoughts on “07 September 2016: Miscellaneous Site Updates”

  2. Karen Stutzer

    George,

    Love all the work you do on this. Thank you so much.

    I do want you to know that the drop downs were working well on my I Pad and I Phone. I could negotiate the site with ease. This fix has resulted in none of the drop downs working on my I pad or I Phone. Everything works fine on my MAC.

    Best regards,
    Karen Stutzer
    21 Hornpout Lane

    1. George Fergusson Post author

      Karen!

      Thank you for bringing this to my attention. I get so little feedback from site visitors I’ve almost (but not quite) stopped even soliciting it.

      I will look into this issue further. A commercial site would have QA engineers and a team of site testers to vet changes before they’re rolled out to make sure nothing breaks. Alas, that does not describe our site. It’s just me, trying as best I can to provide a functional and easy to navigate site.

      I do utilize Google Analytics to monitor site traffic but again, it’s just me on this end and my time is limited. A quick peek shows that out of the last 878 sessions mobile users accounted for 349 of them and of those, 165 used Android OS and 149 used iOS. So iPhone users are a significant percentage of site visitors.

      I’ll do some research into this menu issue and see if there’s something I can do to remedy this. If you don’t mind, I’ll ask you to do some additional testing.

      1. Karen Stutzer

        Thanks George. I am subscribed to the updates and go to the site whenever one comes to my e mail. I really do appreciate your attention to keeping us all in the loop. I will be happy to do testing. The Apple products are awesome when they work and a challenge to deal with when they don’t.

        Karen

        1. George Fergusson Post author

          I’m surprised more people don’t subscribe to updates. I know nothing about Apple products. Once I sat down at a Mac and when I saw that the mouse only had one button, I freaked out 🙂

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