10 Website Improvments
~ December 2006 No.210 ~
We are celebrating our 10th year on the net and have updated our website for the occasion. In keeping with our celetration we have added ten new features to the site.
1) Liquid layout design
This three column layout works. From small screen to big screen, From small text to large text. You can zoom in or out without the design breaking. I tested a number of layouts and this one was inspired by Andrew Krespanis talk/demo site-in-an-hour
2) Goodbye to home
Past visitors will have noticed our side menu bar has been replaced with a horizontal one and with this we have remove the home menu item. To get home just click our logo to go to our homepage.
3) Parlez-vous
On every page is a translate box that has a pull down menu with a selection of 8 languages to choose from. If we select French, voila, the complete page is translated. Not only that but also the internal links.
4) Find what you want
In the right hand box, we can search for articles in Medicinal Food News with a keyword entry. If we put in hrt which is an acronym for hormonal replacement therapy we get two articles listed. If neither article provides you with the information your are looking for you can try our advance search which allows you to select from a number of databases. If we type hrt in the advanced search box and select Google Scholar we get over 100,000 results from scientific journals. Here’s an article of interest Use of HRT and the subsequent risk of cancer. We just click the link to get to the article in this case the abstact from pubmed.
5) Sortable database
The first item on our menu bar is our list of articles. This page contains title links to all articles written from 1997 to date - over 200. The table has sortable headings labeled no., title and keyword. If you click on keyword, that heading is sorted alphabetically ascending. Click it again and it is a descending sort.
6) Peek inside
Moving on to recommended readings. We have a limited number of recommended readings. If choose details, you get more info about the book. But the one thing that is novel on this page is clicking on the books image. This transfers you to Googles book search. On the right hand side is a search box for an internal search on this book if we type yogurt we get the occurrence of every page that has the word blueberry in it.
7) RSS what?
Our in the news feature is a headline list of popular press articles on food for health. Everyday I do a quick search by checking my RSS feeds to find out whats new in the healthy food sections of the major news services. I then post a link to the article I thing would be of interest to our readers. The listing displays the past 3 weeks. A complete listing is post on delicious. Here we can view check out articles by tags. If you select colds, it shows 6 article about colds RSS or Really Simple Syndication allows users to subscribe to their favorite websites here is mine and get a short description of what's new
8) Podcast
We started podcasting some of the the articles
9) Related articles overlay
Only implement in ths article below Inpired by yahoo news site and coding from ibegin
10) Going to print
Before I leave you I just like to point out our print feature. When you print an article from Medicinal food news , it only prints the relevant stuff ie no menus or ads or banner. Here’s a print preview would look like
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