Question from the town hall: nav

@frz this question came in from @TMDesigns right near the end of the town hall and got missed. Maybe you can elaborate here:

(paraphrasing) what happened to the main navs on ConcreteCMS.com?

@Myq @frz there seems to have been a backwards step on the main navigation on both .com .org sites.

The dropdowns have been removed and the site is now harder to navigate. Are the subnavs coming back?

The dropdowns are working for me. The organisation of some pages/dropdowns is very different. At present I am thinking unfamiliar rather than wrong.

The thing I find really awkward is navigation between the sub-sites.

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We realized that while we had created some brand distinction between the .com and .org with the header colors, we were doing ourselves a disservice by trying to have the same main nav across all of these sites.

Someone coming to ConcreteCMS.com is looking to be convinced that Concrete is a great solution for their Mid-Market/Enterprise needs as they look for a secure building material for their web application.

Someone coming to concretecms.org is looking to be convinced that Concrete is a very free open source tool they can rely on as they choose what framework to invest their development time into learning.

The main nav of a website is basically the story telling mechanism, it’s the table of contents for your book. Trying to have one architecture that tells a compelling story to completely different audiences is going to be an exercise in compromise at best.

Since changing the nav, we’ve seen sales leads & demo setups almost double… So nah, not broken. :wink:

That said, no idea why you’re not getting drop downs. Clear cache?

And yeah, JTF, I hear ya… Getting around these sites has become frustratingly organic. Agreed. I expect that cross navigation in content and even in some of the choices in these drop downs will improve over time as we continue to look at traffic patterns and user behavior.

Best I can say is bookmark the pages that are most important to you, and be happy that we’re asking ourselves hard questions and measuring results in an effort to get more new people interested in Concrete.

Thanks @franz and @JohntheFish looks like a caching issue.

That’s great news you doubled the sign up. Now I can see the dropdowns it’s make sense.

School boy error on the cache clearing.

On the question of dropdowns not working, I tried to delete all my old emails from my Inbox and my Sent box, I could ‘Select All’ but the dropdown did not appear to choose an option?
I inspected the element in the browser console and found a css declaration ‘display:none’ was preventing the dropdown from displaying, switching off that css declaration in the console allowed the dropdown to display and I was able to choose ‘delete’ which worked perfectly.

uhhh. bit of a thread hijack, but sure - I believe you.
We’ve got a sprint lined up for a bunch of PM improvements, so I’ll make sure this gets added as a ticket to explore there.