My Travelogue

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General Information

A collection of stories about my years of overland travel, holidays and short breaks, around the world.

Welcome to Ivan's whole wide world photo travelogue.
                 What's new;- Just finished the story 'Tales of my first time - Trans Asia 1975 trip' A good read, full of surprises.

 

This is the introduction and navigation around my Travelogue site. Wander around here awhile or jump straight in using the top row of blue menus.

On page notes and credits

Photo Galleries The photo gallery links frequently open a new site, use the back button to return here or press the ‘Lightroom’ header to return to the home page.

This page last updated:

 

On page navigation

General Information

Site Structure

Despite the huge subject matter, this site has a relatively simple structure. Unfortunately this leads to more clicks than is normally recommended, but hopefully results in a relatively intuitive simple to navigate site.

There are a number of tiered menus, some site wide, others in respect of a particular trip or holiday. Additionally, where appropriate, there are menus for on page navigation. This is generally only for long or multi-subject pages.

Lets start at the top of the page and work down.

The menu at the top of the page, above the rotating banner, light brown and light green in hue, is the primary directory for all of the web sites in my collection. It is used throughout this travel website. Each click here opens a new tab and jumps to another interest.

The next section down is the scrolling images. A click on one of those takes you to the relevant  part of the site or sub-site. Also, it is planed that each sub-site will have a different collection of images in this area. The images will therefore become the easy recognition element of the page. An alternative was to have different colour horizontal bars for each sub-site. This would have had a negative impact of the consistent look and feel too the site, which was part of my objective.

Then there is the first blue dropdown menu, 'Contents'. This is the primary navigation around the travel part of the site. It is consistent throughout the site. As you can see, it is arranged into the main regions of the world, both land and sea. In addition there are special areas of interest in so far as my home country, Great Britain, and my Grand Tour.

For instance, click on 'Continents' and you have displayed options of each of the continents. Some of the names of continents have changed over time. Those used are current at time of writing. Clicking on a particular continent will take you to an overview of that continent and some comments about trips or holidays there, together with appropriate links. But you don't have to visit that page. Hover over the continents with a '>' and another side cast menu will open. This will bypass the continent overview page an go directly to the trip or holiday transfer page.

What is a transfer page? This is where it gets a bit techie. The site is currently constructed using nested master dynamic web templates (DWT). the master prime dwt controls the look and feel of the website as a whole. The next level controls this part of the site. Each of the sub-sites also has a dedicated second level master dwt. The transfer page is the last page of this part of the site before launching into a sub-site, with a different master. This is not strictly necessary, it could link directly from the menu to the sub-site. However, I prefer this method as you, the reader, gets some insight, in the way of an introduction, before going to another sub-site. Eventually I would like to replace this method with a system where the content of a page is generated from a database full of information, stories, and images. I have started to learn Visual Studio and MS-SQL to assist in this, but it will be a long struggle to learn enough. I will start with a more simple site than this one as my practice site. One that is more aligned with products to display, before trying to take on a site this complicated.

Enough techie stuff. The next level of blue dropdown menus is a local menu, for the sub-site as described above. In this part of the site it is entitled the 'Preface'. In other parts of the site it will be the menus for that trip or holiday. Specific, not generatic.

Clear as mud? Think of it as a multi volume set of books, such as an Encyclopedia Britannica, the top brown and green menus, are the contents for all of the volumes, the first blue dropdowns are each volume, and the second blue dropdown each chapter.

The final level of menus is not always present. It is the on page menu, From here you are able to jump down the page without having to use the scroll bar. It is only normally used for very long or multi-subject pages. Currently, there are left on this page as an example.

Sorry, this page has not been finished yet.

 

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