Website improvement ideas

One of the actions from the meeting the other day was that sim manuals will be standardised and follow a specific format in terms of sections. It'll take time to update existing ones though.

GeoffM in post 114983 said:

One of the actions from the meeting the other day was that sim manuals will be standardised and follow a specific format in terms of sections. It'll take time to update existing ones though.

Has a template been decided on, or is it still under discussion?

RainbowNines in post 114974 said:

It has got a lot better in recent years but still some pages are awash with information and others are sparse and rather terse (both sim manuals and other pages) - yes I know anyone is able to change it, but wholesale rewrites of people’s hard work is not something that should be done at the drop of a hat, and in some cases that’s what’s required.

Could you provide some examples of pages that need changing? I'm happy to take a look at them.

Norman B said:

The Wiki needs a Wiki editor who will standardise the layout,information and the writing style used.within all of the simulation description manuals.Some of the information used within the sims and the site has inconsistencies much like the old Railway rule book which had a rule,followed the an exception followed by one or more other exceptions .We need a consistent standard applied throughout the site

As above, some examples would be welcome. In terms of standardising layouts, I've done quite a bit of tidying on the Wiki over the years, to try and keep things in order. Again, I'm happy to take a look at anything that needs tidying up.

Perhaps the home page needs to be a bit more informative and perhaps include a short embedded video/animation Simsig in use?
This old web page is informative https://web.archive.org/web/20010720015312/http://www.SimSig.co.uk:80/docs/about.html it tells you what SimSig is about.

Peter

My content design experience all lies within government, where content best practice essentially spoon feeds people the information they’re looking for. I don’t know if that’s what you want SimSig to do, or whether you’d prefer to guide people to investigate manuals, etc for themselves to save a deluge of flapping on the forum when someone who didn’t read anything gets stuck after five minutes.

The link in that line of text is coloured green and unless you hover the mouse pointer over it, if you are new to the site you probably wouldn’t even realise that it was a link.
I think that links should be made more obvious, either by changing the colour to perhaps red or actually saying click this ‘link’ which as I said above, needs to be made more easily identified.

If you click on one of the sims, for example ‘Aston’, shortly after the ‘Introduction’, there is a link to the ‘User manual’. If it was possible, it would be useful if there was a also a link so that you could download the sim as well.

One of the actions from the meeting the other day was that sim manuals will be standardised and follow a specific format in terms of sections. It'll take time to update existing ones though.

"Mark all read" I am aware is not marking absoltely everything read (within the 90 day cut-off), but am unable to understand why at the moment.

Little bit of a 'wall of text' but not too bad. Getting rid of all the junk on the left hand side (shout box etc) until logged in will improve it.

Maybe put the animated gif closer to the top of the page, a gif of the Queen St area to complement the 2 shots of the IECC would be better than Liverpool St if possible.

1. Only a very minor point, but in the Section “How much is it?” I think that the word “then” should be “they”

2. The text under the right-hand picture is incorrect. It’s a picture of Glasgow Queen Street, not Edinburgh.

Not sure if we can control the ads that appear, but I just took a look at the new landing page and got the ad in the screen grab attached. This would be really confusing to the un-initiated...…

Getting rid of all the junk on the left hand side (shout box etc) until logged in will improve it.

Some simulations can be "chained", which is where adjacent areas can be linked together to form a larger area.

Dick in post 115064 said:

Getting rid of all the junk on the left hand side (shout box etc) until logged in will improve it.

There is no shout box when logged out. Others have said that they do want some of the things on the left. Perhaps lose the ads but that's all.