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