WikiStudent Blog

Yesterday I mentioned implementing breadcrumbs on WS, but wasn’t wildly enthusiastic. Now I am! Here are two reasons:

1. I implemented my breadcrumb extension of choice and it works wonderfully.
2. I realised that this is not just a ‘nice to have’ optional extra, but a really necessary navigational tool.

Before I elaborate on the above, here’s a pic of what the breadcrumb trail will look like on the page for Commercial Law, CLA201V:

One thing that had slipped my mind (and it’s what many other website designers easily forget) is that not everybody will arrive on your site through the front door (i.e. the home page). So many of us spend so much time making the home page enticing, meanwhile people googling for e.g. CLA201V will not land on the home page, but on the CLA201V page, so it must be clear when you arrive where you are in the hierarchy of the site. Someone looking at the breadcrumb trail above will (hopefully) think “Oh good, there are more Law pages” and go there too. They will also be able to click on the “Unisa Modules” link, which will display ALL Unisa modules, and ALL categories, nicely sorted in alphabetical order. I think this is brilliant!

It means I have to change stuff around a bit though. I had created a “Unisa Modules” namespace, but after doing this breadcrumb thing I realised that it would be better to create a “Unisa Modules” category. All the other categories previously mentioned (E.g. Law, Accounting…) will be sub-categories of the “Unisa Modules” one. Luckily I hadn’t wasted too much time by re-naming every single module page when I decided to go the namespace route.

Oh, and for anyone who’s interested in the technicalities behind making the above breadcrumb trail, here’s how it’s done:

1. Navigate to MediaWiki:Breadcrumbs
2. Insert the following line : * Law @ ”’You are here:”’ [[Main Page]] > [[:Category:Unisa Modules|Unisa Modules]] > [[:Category:Law|Law]] >

This will create breadcrumbs for all law pages. I will need to repeat the above for each of the other 20 or so categories. (But I won’t do it now in case I come up with an even better way of doing breadcrumbs. Not likely though!)

Tags: Usability

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 16th, 2009 at 4:51 pm and is filed under Navigation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.