Regarding sosme BHT input about "the site Bowhuntiing.net is cluttered." I've been told this before and I've asked about it many times in one on one conversations. My main question has been;

How do we unclutter it?

The only suggestion I've received until posting here in BHT was to have a picture of a deer with arrows to its ears, eyes, nose, legs, stomach, etc. and put text on the arrow that says, for example, How to fool a deer's nose. An interesting thought but it leaves out too much of what we are doing.

So ................. I ask you for your help, how do we unclutter it?

Here is the link http://www.bowhunting.net

Robert Hoague

Robert,
First let me say your site starts out Bold and it pops on the page. Your banner in red demands attention, your ads then take over and they are good, you see bows and different items.. but then I start to get lost on the repetition of articles or what ever and the page just keeps on going. So that is why I said it was cluttered. There is so much happening from side to side and up and down that once you get past the banner and Yours and Rich's photo... you start to loose focus of where you want to go to. Maybe mouse over or buttons that take you to different pages for sponsors or articles,photos reviews and keep the front page cleaner and easier to navigate.
Does that make sense.
Pat Patterson

Pat

Thanks for your quick response. It gets down to some specifics about where and what the clutter is to you. This is what I'm looking for. Anybody else got any comments. I wanna hear them.

Robert Hoague

More White Space, although I prefer actually a light pastel colour background. Have an Articles of the Day section, and then link to other pages, Articles of the past week, month, and a clear link to archives by year and month and type of article.

Recently it's gotten better than I recalled, so it's mostly an easier to navigate archive, and less of a list on the front page, scrolling down things tend to get lost, if they were broken up I think it might be easier to handle.

IMO archiving a lot of the hunting items, and bow tube videos and images would help. There are hunts from opening day of 09 season, and further back. Also a single link to a separate page of sponsors would be nice. Instead of a list of sponsors for BH store, and then images and ads below them. Maybe a quick link to a daily update, rather than each article listed by itself would open up some space. in general it is not bad, but navigating through all the older items can sometimes take a while.

I would say look at some other sites, such as Texas Trophy Hunters, to get an idea of what I am talking about. TTH has a lot of info but not nearly as cluttered.

Rather than having direct links to so many stories and daily blogs you have to assume that the user can navigate to where they want to go. I don't think you need everything on the front page. You need the basic, current info and then ways to navigate to other items, especally the older stuff.

I like a main page like TTH, and this is pretty common, that has an alternating banner of pictures/articles. You watch it go from slide to slide and click on the one that interests you. This cause much less clutter. Instead of having 5 stories all displayed and cluttering the page, you have one banner that rotates through each one.

On your front page there are hunt reports dating back for months. The front page is so long it takes several scrolls to get to the bottom. I would think anything older than a day or two should be taken off the front page and just have a drop down that would allow you to navigate to them. I think this is common practice in other sites I visit.

The toughest one is all the advertisers that you have. I know you cannot get rid of them but there are so many small ads that I do not think they are effective. You do use an alternating banner for some advertising but there are still a ton of small ones that serve to clutter. If possible I would select a smaller number of advertisers and give them BIG space for big dollars rather than having dozens and dozens of the small contributors that make it hard to fit them all in.

You have a wonderful website and the concept is obviously a great and unique one. Keep up the good work.

Thanks again for more input. KEEP IT COMING!

Really appreciate it.

What is clutter to me? When I look at the site I see mouse over buttons at the top that will take you to the same items you have on the front page. I really think you should have a front page or home and then have pages that your mouse over will take you to. You have it already set up but the page (front ) takes 3 or 4 scrolls down to even get to the bottom and there lies a archive all the way back to 04 and beyond...everything is on one page... It's not like you have a web site but a singleweb page.. and all of your info is on one page.
Turkey section, deer section, Q&A section, gear section, outfitter and hunt section.. I could go on but if I were to go to a web page and want to find information about... gear, I could look at the section I wanted instead of trying to find it on one page holds all of the topics.
This would un clutter the page to me and allow you to find what you were looking for or what your interest are... seperate pages for blogs, pages for reviews but linked to the front page...

Some articles are a series, is there a way to group the series to keep them together? When they are dispursed in all the other articles you can, and I have, missed one of a series.

Konk

In some areas we are the prisoner of the software. We use a newspaper program for the articles on Bowhunting.net and basically it does a dandy job. Unfortunately it does not have a way to put a series of articles together.

Technically we could create a new Category for a particular series. But we have categories up to ouf eyeballs already.

But this is a good suggestion and we will make an effort to figure this out.

Robert

http://bowhunting.net/

This is much better, looks really good and easy to navigate. Job well done

Thanks Pat. I was going to ask what everyone thought of the new site... but with all the BHT problems right now, I figured I wouldnt ask right now... but you broke the ice. Thanks!

Agreed!

I look forward to enjoying all the features when it is completed. Godspeed!

Well, we have a few writer profiles to add and a couple columns to add to the drop down navigation but otherwise we are pretty much done!!

Collin,
Don't you agree that the page is much better with the action buttons? You don't have one continuous page and you navigate to the area you are looking for? I just browsed it briefly but it's so much easier and organized. A person who visits the page for the first time will not be over whelmed by all of the adds and then never ending page....again job well done....

I agree, I took a lot of feedback from the people here at BHT to get this site put together... a few of the ideas came from you guys too. so Thanks!

One thing I really like, that will get some interaction going on the website, is that you can leave comments on articles, videos, etc... so be sure to take advantage!!! I like to see what people think about things and learn from them!!1!