Thoughts on site redesign?

[Arun Prasad]

I'm updating Ambuda's design to better scale to the ~200 texts we have now and prepare for adding 1000+ texts. This update is in progress and will fully roll out over the next week or so.

Key changes:

- Index page now leads with a search bar over all texts in the library. (This is a title search only, sorry! Full text search coming eventually.)

- Texts now support a "Catalog" view that helps power users browse the library and look for specific texts. The "Collections" view is more user-friendly and will remain the default.

- Texts have an easy access "Downloads" tab, which includes two new downloads for all site metadata. This is for catalog ingestion into other projects.

- The site uses a cleaner visual language for headers and sub-headers. This is currently available for "Texts" and "About" but will come to other sections soon.

Upcoming challenges:

- Site performance (See my other thread on "Technical issues" -- some basic queries are noticeably slow when querying 200+ texts, and I don't think they will scale well to 1000+).

- Localization. We previously used a third-party service to manage site translations, but I'll bring this onto the main site under /proofing .

- Discovery. A list of 1000+ texts is very hard to explore and browse without more context, maybe including a short summary of each text.

Arun

[Avinash L Varna]

The site looks very nice overall. I think it would be nice to have a hierarchical view of the collections on the landing page (similar to what is shown in the side-bar of the catalog page on the desktop version) - either via some sort of accordion or folder like interface. Esp. on mobile, I have to scroll a lot just to get to the second collection.

Thanks

Avinash

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[Arun Prasad]

Agreed, it's quite painful. Part of why I want to add as many texts as I can to is more clearly expose these pain points.

I kept it this way initially since GRETIL does it too, which makes searching for a text very easy (eg see https://gretil.sub.uni-goettingen.de/gretil.html). This was before we had our search bar. But the downside is that it's not navigable (plus we have our search bar now).

- I like what Sefaria (https://www.sefaria.org/texts) does with folders -- maybe something similar here, but I also don't want the folders to be too deep. (I think a good rule of thumb is "I should be able to go to any text within three clicks")

- Scaife uses a big list of authors with drilldown into texts. But it's also very slow and hard to navigate if you don't know the author https://scaife.perseus.org/library/ 

- I like what https://sanskritsahitya.org/ does but it won't scale well to 1000+ texts

So the accordion you suggest seems promising.

I also like showing a "top X" per category with an option to expand and see more. I guess this is just an accordion with a preview.

Arun

[Arun Prasad]

Shipped a temporary measure that should work for now. Landing page now shows toplevel categories only with links to the category's full text list. Will update this in the future to show nested categories, etc.

Arun