Intro
Hey everyone, this is the redesign that Navigation's been working on for the past.. three months or so.
As many of you know, the current sidebar and topbar are… a bit bloated. There's 700 links, many of which linked to outdated or absolutely useless destinations (seriously who in their right mind ever used Links?). To solve this issue of bloat and misguided intentions, we decided to torch the whole current design and start from the ground up.
We rebuilt the topbar and sidebar from the ground up, only looking at the current one for inspiration after we fully made a conceptual build of what it should look like. Obviously this wouldn't work out perfectly since we do know how the sidebar and topbar look like anyways, but it could help reset back to zero the most we could. By the time we were done, we had around a quarter of the links, and by the time you see this now it's gone through significant changes and cleanups.
Intents
I'll give a quick rundown of each element and what was our intended use for it.
Conceptually, we decided to separate the topbar, sidebar, and frontpage to three unique functions:
- The topbar would function as a place for steady, reliable links. Things that help you navigate around the site but you don't need at hand's reach, and links that stay mostly the same. Resources and Rules are probably the best examples.
- The sidebar would function as a place for discovery and fast navigation. Here's links that let you read stuff and jump around the site with ease. The Discovery tab is the best example.
- The frontpage (we'll redesign it next, don't worry) would be more a place for news and rotating stuff that you don't need to check all that often, along with a section designated for new users specifically.
We tried to adhere to each designation as best as we could.
Specific Stuff
There's some stuff that is either brought up often or will likely be brought up, so here's some preemptive explanations:
- The "for new users" section is on the sidebar because we need some way for new users to navigate the site (and discover what the site even is) on every page. New users have a notoriously difficult time figuring out where to start and what to do, and so having this link here might help guide them to the right path, no matter where they landed.
- SCP Series was removed from the topbar since it both looks nicer on the sidebar, and was taking up enough space on mobile to create visual issues.
- SCP Tales by Series is currently missing, since we are planning to put a link to it on the top of the SCP Series Hubs regardless. This change should come out soon after the redesign.
In any case, we hope you like the redesign, and if you have any questions bring them up in the 05 or mainsite thread.