Soliciting your opinion on WW2DB

[temujin77]

Hey guys,

For those who frequent the "RSS Links" section on this forum, you probably already noticed that I recently stumbled upon a nice collection of US Navy photos on the Wildcat fighter, and I've been posting them all over the past few weeks. Now that I have posted all 50 of them, I just realized that the side navigation column suddenly got REALLY long, completely throwing the design off. Some of you may have noticed that already. So, what I did tonight was the following (please see the link below to get a visual):

WW2DB: F4F Wildcat

1. Made a thumbnail gallery of the first three photos that belongs to the topic.
2. If there are more than three photos, clicking on the thumbnails will take you to a photo album listing all the photos.
3. If there are three or less, than clicking on the thumbnails will directly open up the full size version of the photo.
4. Finally, the right-panel links for images have been removed.

For a reminder of what right-panel image links look like, see this link:

WW2DB: Hornet (Yorktown-class)

What do you guys think of the new layout? Do you think I should apply the new thumbnail style to all sections (people, events, etc.)?

By a way, a friend of mine thinks the thumbnails should always open up full size; in other words, #2 and #3 above should not be two separate styles. Any thoughts on that?

Thanks guys!

[Jim O]

Originally Posted by temujin77

What do you guys think of the new layout? Do you think I should apply the new thumbnail style to all sections (people, events, etc.)?

By a way, a friend of mine thinks the thumbnails should always open up full size; in other words, #2 and #3 above should not be two separate styles. Any thoughts on that?

Thanks guys!

I was going to wait and see if other people posted before I did but I wanted to bump this back up. I like the thumbnails and think you should apply it to all sections. I like the idea of either a thumbnail gallery so that people browsing the site will have the option to see full sized images based on a thumbnail not a description. That is likely to actually save bandwidth in the long run I would imagine.

[temujin77]

Bandwidth isn't much of an issue, Dreamhost offers bandwidth that I would need to be Slashdotted and Digged for an entire month before I'd get close to hitting the limit

Appreciate the comments, Jim!

[Jim O]

Originally Posted by temujin77

Bandwidth isn't much of an issue, Dreamhost offers bandwidth that I would need to be Slashdotted and Digged for an entire month before I'd get close to hitting the limit

Appreciate the comments, Jim!

LOL at the techie talk. I assume those are types of web attacks.

[temujin77]

Hehe, sorry, old habits of a geek

"Slashdotted" and "Digged" are past tense of verbs created by computer geeks. They refer to being featured on slashdot.org or digg.com, both focus much more so on technology than other topics. While there is no better way to get publicity for your tech-related website than being featured on those sites (and a few others like them), many MANY sites had also gone sluggish for several days, sometimes gone down completely, because either their hosting web servers cannot handle the user load or the bandwidth limitations had been reached within a few hours of being on Slashdot or Digg. Quite an interesting phenomenon.

[Jim O]

Ahh. OK. What do you want from an old guy who never took a computer science course as an undergrad?

[Tom Houlihan]

What do you guys think of the new layout? Do you think I should apply the new thumbnail style to all sections (people, events, etc.)?

Well, I left it alone, since I don't really have any particular preferences. I guess I do have to say that I don't really like going into albums all that much. I know if there are a lot of photos, you don't have much choice, but...

That said, whether it's an album or just a "pile" of thumbnails, let me decide which photos I want to look at full-size.

I just went back to the site and looked around. I liked the group of thumbnails at the bottom. If you wanted to do that with the rest of the site, that would be fine with me! Then, if you have more than just a few similarly-themed shots, just put a link for more, or something like that.

I'm tired. Don't pay any attention to me...

[temujin77]

Tired or not, you're a member of my valued visitors to WW2DB, so of course I'm paying attention to you

I just deployed what I did to the aircraft section to the remainder of the site (people, events, ships), and I think it looks rather nice. I know what you're saying about albums, sometimes they are troublesome to navigate, but it's hard to do it any other way especially for those topics with tons of pictures. Take Pearl Harbor, Midway, Wildcat, Japan's surrender ceremonies, etc. for example, those articles have so many pictures and it's hard to just list them, text or thumbnail, on a single page. Kind of a tough position but I think the current album-like approach is a good approach for now. If y'all think of any possible improvements to that, just let me know...