robglazebrook.com

I’ve noticed recently that, ever since I started my full time web design job, I’d been neglecting my personal, freelance, or otherwise creative endeavors. So much so that I didn’t really have any side projects anymore. And that sort of bothered me. So what did I do? The obvious thing: I started a redesign of my blog!

And then I thought about it. And I decided that a 7th version of rootarcana.com wasn’t really what I needed. I needed something new, something I hadn’t really tried before. Perhaps even something that would, as I always hoped Rootarcana would (but never did), pay for itself.

From this contemplation was born the idea for Extra-Life-Games.com. Extra Life is a web portal of sorts, with the goal of helping people find good prices on new, used, and pre-played videogames. Fundamentally and admittedly, it is a retail affiliate site. I have no products of my own. Instead, I’m helping other companies find customers for their products. In return, I get a rather small slice O’ the pie. I’m like the travel agent on the island of misfit toys. Or, you know, something like that.

How is my site different from other affiliate sites (and there are literal kajillions (note: figurative kajillions))? For starters, and no offense to other affiliators out there, but most affiliate site are really ugly in terms of both design and code. While my site is by no means the epitome of visual excellence, it’s also not exactly hard on the eyes (and it will hopefully improve over time), and my code isn’t half bad, either. Also, my site provides quasi-decent search functionality, because I’ve taken the time to load all of the products into a database. I could have put the site together much faster without a DB, but it wouldn’t be nearly as useful. Also, most affiliate sites that I know of cater to an extremely small niche (i.e., a specific game or series of games). At the time of this writing, my catalogue contains just over 100 videogames, and I fully intend to add 50-75 new games to the list every week (and if you have a game you want to see listed, let me know and I’ll see what I can do).

So will this idea work? I don’t really know. I consider it an interesting concept, at the least. If I’m lucky, the site will pay for itself, and my efforts will not have resulted in yet another hole into which I voluntarily throw my money. If I’m really lucky, I’ll turn a small profit, which would encourage me to play around more with this business model - I’ve already bought a couple other domain names that I have ideas for. Time will tell, and we shall see. In the meantime, let me know what you think.

When it comes right down to it, I am a fan of navigation. I like organizing websites and designing navigation bars. I read about information architecture in my spare time. My thesis work is thick with IA-type issues. So when a friend (Quinn) recently pointed me towards Stephen Clark’s Mini Slide Navigation, I was impressed, intrigued, and above all, inspired. I decided to see if I could improve upon this fantastic idea.

Click here (or on the sample image above) to see the results of that inspiration. I’m calling my creation Smart Mini Tabs, with “smart” being the key word in that title. See, good navigation should always serve two purposes: it should tell you where you can go, and it should tell you where you are. It’s easy to develop a navbar to do the former, while the latter takes some doing. Smart Mini Tabs accomplish the latter by recognizing where the user is located in the grand scheme of things, and making that location obvious. This is accomplished in the JavaScript by:

1. Comparing the browser’s location with the href tags located in the navigation anchors,
2. Marking that anchor with a “current” class, and
3. Returning the tab to that anchor when the user isn’t using the navigation.

As such, the sliding tab not only serves as an indication of which link the user is currently mousing over, it also acts as a visual breadcrumb, marking their location in site’s hierarchy. In other words, the tabs are both attractive and functional.

The Smart Mini Tabs are also smart in that they allow for variable tab sizes. No longer must each tab be a fixed width. As the tab slides from one location to the next, it also changes size to match that of the link to which it is moving. This means that not only can you create variable width tabs (”home” and “design portfolio” needn’t take up the same space), but that Smart Mini Tabs are also friendlier when the user changes text sizes.

Smart Mini Tabs are known to work in Firefox 1.5, IE6, and Safari. If you know them to work/fail in other browsers, please let me know. Tweaking must inevitably ensue, and updates will be noted on the Smart Mini Tabs Testbed page. If you have any comments or suggestions, I’d love to hear them. Comment away!