The sites necessarily have their own specific purpose and navigation, but does it need to be so hard to navigate between the sites? To at least get some consistency, can we have one common menu dropdown section, repeated on all sites with the same links and labels in the same order:
A link to each community site
A link to the get concrete/download page
A link to send messages
Some challenges for the folks at Portland labs responsible for the menus (and for @frz’s Mom):
Go to the marketplace site. Using nothing but the main navigation bar, navigate through the sites and download a copy of the latest concrete core.
Go to the forums site. Using nothing but the main navigation bar, navigate to a page where you can send a Concrete Private Message to someone who posted.
I am sure there are more site navigation paths that are hopelessly obfuscated or impossible, or where it is obvious to go one way, but impossible to get back again. The above are a couple of examples that should be simple, but are not. We need a general and obvious to users solution for between site navigation.
I totally agree. The two URLs should urgently be harmonized. Large international companies turn back to one single harmonized URL’s instead of many country sites.
I wasn’t able to get what I wanted, I endend up in many mouse trips in various navigations.
…If you can’t captivate a possible user in minutes, you’ve lost. Goes also well with the truism “You never have a second chance to give your first impression”, meaning, that once you are turned off by the complication/difficulty you’re off, somewhere else.
I couldn’t agree more! Sometimes when clicking around the cache causes issues where it says I am already logged in but can’t see anything or navigate anywhere. Especially annoying is when a simple click goes to yet another login page… Agree - why does it have to be so difficult?
I do think these sites deserve to have unique navigations as they serve unique problems.
That said, I do agree it’s not easy to get around between them.
Something I’d add to this concern that I’m surprised hasn’t been mentioned yet is our mobile nav - which is garbage. As we think about ways to make it easier to get around, we should absolutely revisit the mobile nav too.
I don’t think this is a cache issue. What may be happening here is you’re being automatically logged into a new site, but the page you’re accessing is something you don’t have access to. Instead of saying so, we say “you’re already logged in” because of annoying edge cases. We’ve got a ticket to make that better.
As we think about ways to make it easier to get around, we should absolutely revisit the mobile nav too.