Formatting long lists

[senocular]

Any thoughts on formatting long lists?

Im doing updates for a housing community site and they have a list of guidelines which you can see here (warning! frames!)

http://www.swanpoint.org/spUOR/mas_sp_gl.html

The site is a mess but I get allotted a few hours a week for updates and to hopefully, eventually, make it not suck as much.

Right now Im just trying to think of another way to format this huge list of guidelines that remains to be as accessible as this list but not suck as much. Any Ideas?


Id rather not separate each item into a new page, but that is doable. Maybe some kind of drop-down? or a scrolling vertical list? I dont think Ive ever dealt with anything this big before

[antizip]

i think a floating drop down javascript menu would work better. Maybe have two columns on the drop down instead of one long one

[senocular]

even two columns would be pretty long. It would be easier if they could be grouped in some way - I just dont see how they could.

[antizip]

How about having a windows 98 start menu type thing. Where there's one column but you don't show it all and are able to scroll up/down on a short list.

like this
http://img234.imageshack.us/img234/9499/menu3qw.gif

[senocular]

yeah, I was thinking about something like that. Still too long though? There are like 50+ items. Could take a while to scroll and given the people in the community, I can see them complaining about something like that. But its something to play with - thanks :)

[lunatic]

Argh that's an awful site.

I guess you could also do a menu within a menu type thing organized by first letter. So first menu has four buttons: A-L, M-P, Q-S, T-Z or something. And then organize items within that structure?

Not a preferred way of organizing but might clean it up a bit. :)

[senocular]

I thought of the alphabet thing too - that sounds like the best kind of "grouping" you can get. I'll have to see how that turns out. I guess a menu of alpha spans like that isnt too bad.

But it is a nasty site, isnt it haha.

[lunatic]

Yeah and actually, after I wrote that I looked at it again. An alphabetzied menu would work but how would you organize the actual information? You could do it in pages but you mentioned you were hoping to avoid that. Hmmmm . . .

It'd be great if you coud make some kind of database and have a form that asked a few simple questions to find out what the user was looking for and just draw up that particular paragraph of info. Of course, this doesn't work if the user is just browsing. But a keyword search would help dumb the site down a bit.

[antizip]

this might be a stretch since it involves taking your hands off the mouser. A search-as-you-type search box and when it's empty it shows the complete list.

I think the alphabet grouping drop down menus are the way to go

[senocular]

this might be a stretch since it involves taking your hands off the mouser. A search-as-you-type search box and when it's empty it shows the complete list.
That would be nice, but given that this is a "small" site for a collection of about 200 or so people (who may or may not even use it), I dont think its worth the effort ;)

It looks like the alpha-list is the way to go! :pleased:

[bwh2]

actually, i think this site has the right idea by using frames. take that top part out of tables, slap it into 4 lists, change the bg colors and jazz up some headlines and you've got a good thing going.