Re: WEBSITE REVIEW: Online Magazine

[infocentre]

Seems like this didn’t go to sleep like i wanted! Oh well – here are some things that i have added since these discussions to make things that little bit better for user experience.

Navigation ‘Reminder’

When you land on any one of the inner (actual article pages), you are now reminded/shown the navigation and ‘Quick Page Skip’ area in the top left corner as it unfolds itself.

This was done using a simple bit of jQuery, adding some cookies and such:

You will see that the cookie expires in 7 days, so you wont get hit EVERY time you come to the mag, but gently reminded for most issues.

As i am testing the water with this function, it may be that we set it to a much higher value if people dont need reminding.

Still to do…

The above reminds/shows people of the quick skip navigation, but not the page-turning which we would like them to use. Using the same technique of cookie-ing (?), i will likely introduce some fade-in images that show how to turn the page.

Focus Group

Taking into consideration what was said about the ‘simple tasks’ of finding content, we will be getting together a focus group to see what they think sometime in the near future.

Caching

I have never had good experiences with Caching plugins on WP, so did want to steer-clear. But after a lot of reading i decided to go with Hyper Cache and so far so good! This should help things with speed slightly.

Page Pre-loading

This was the biggest challenge and as far as i know has not been done anywhere else yet to this effect.

With the help of a very clever person on stackoverflow, he came up with this code that fetches any attached images for the Next page (technically the previous post..) and loads them into a hidden DIV.

$next_post = get_adjacent_post(false, '', false );// set last param to true if you want post that is chronologically previous

//for debug

if(!empty($next_post)){

echo 'Next post title is: '.$next_post->post_title;

} else {

echo 'global $post is not set or no corresponding post exists';

}

$args = array('post_type' => 'attachment', 'numberposts' => -1, 'post_parent' => $next_post->ID);

$attachments = get_posts($args);

// print attachments for debug

echo '
';print_r($attachments);echo '
';

?>


Obviously you can ignore the Debug stuff, but it’s really interesting to see in action!
The purpose of this is that if someone is browsing from page to page, (after the first page..) they are actually loading the image/images on the next page. So, once they turn, the image is there almost instantly and they will be probably unaware that they are then loading the image to the next page and so on!
Thanks to rickylamerz for the inspiration for the idea – but i really owe it to the chap at stackoverflow who put it into practice!
So, dare i say it – let me know what you think!