Nips, tucks, and refreshes

Posted on 14 May 2014 by Admin

If you are a regular DigitalNZ visitor, you’ll have noticed a few changes we’ve been rolling out on the site over the last six months or so. We thought it’d be helpful to let you know what we’ve been up to, and also ask for any feedback or thoughts you have about these changes.

Mobile

Firstly, at the end of last year, we worked with our amazing developers Boost New Media and designers Clicksuite, and made www.digitalnz.org mobile and tablet friendly. Before, it was tricky trying to navigate the site via any device that wasn’t your good ol’ desktop computer or laptop. We were particularly keen also to make it easier for you to read blog posts (like this one) on your mobile and see the search results display clearly.

We hope that this will make DigitalNZ easier for classrooms that are running BYOD sessions, as students will be able to search and make sets more easily on tablets now.

Home page

Also at the end of last year, the keen-eyed among you may have noticed we had a bit of a home page refresh. We shuffled content around so that our navigation bars at the top were more logical and our search guides were easier to find.

We also whipped up a new ‘Introduction to DigitalNZ’ screencast for the homepage. This is especially for first-time DigitalNZ searchers and introduces who we are, and how to do a basic search on the site.

Search filters and pagination

In the last couple of months, we’ve been all about the search filters. We knew that the ‘Image’ tab was really popular, so when we brought in 150,000 audio items from Radio New Zealand, we thought it’d be great to provide an 'Audio’ tab to make browsing this material easier.

So, we turfed out the ‘Types' and ‘Formats’ buttons under ‘Open Filters’ and made tabs for all the different formats along the top of the search results, like this:

We also did some work on the pagination of search results. Now, if you are looking at an item and need to return to your search results, you'll return to the page you left, rather than the beginning of all your results (which is what was frustratingly happening before).

We hope all these changes make www.digitalnz.org more user-friendly. The site is growing daily, and the API is now accessing well over 27 million items. That's heaps! And we are always looking for ways to make this content more easily searchable.

We'd love to hear what you think, so have a click around and see how you find the site working. Email us info@digitalnz.org.nz or tweet us @DigitalNZ and let us know if you are happy/sad/ambivalent/hungry, and we'll try and help out where we can.

Comments

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* NB The first time we posted this blog, we neglected to mention the excellent designers at Clicksuite who worked with us on these updates. This blog was updated to correct this omission in June 2014.

I think you might like to check your entry: http://digitalnz.org/blog/posts/nips-tucks-and-refreshes. The link: http://digitalnz.org/blog/posts/www.clicksuite.co.nz does not appear to work

Thanks Cherry! We've fixed the broken link.

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