As you may have noticed, our site has now a new navigation menu, that you can find at the top of the pages, just like a button bar. At the same time, the page header was changed in order to include some informations and the search function, now available in a more easy way to find.
If you like to know more about these new features, please read the rest of this article.
Page header
First, I'm going to talk about page headers and their new features. New informations are now displayed an the top of each page, near the four goblins, and may be different depending on the fact that the user logged in or not when he accessed the site.
Unregistered and not logged in users are going to find a first row with the date and a welcome message that identifies them as guests, and a second row with fields to log in. Finally, a third row is used to give immediate access to the search function, that users can now use easily from every page.
On the other way, registered users that logged in will see a different header, only including the date, the welcome message identifying them by username, and obviously the same search function.
All new features we included in the page header are intended to substitute parts of the "Login & Info" block that you are used to find in the right column, and the whole "Search" box that you can find in the left column. Both these blocks will be kept active for some time, even though we strongly suggest you to start using the new features in the page header.
In fact, after a short test period needed to check that everything is working fine, we're going to deactivate the search block as well as the login and welcome features from the other, leaving these functions only in the page header. In this way, we'll be able to free some space needed or more important things and more new features.
The navigation menu
At the top of the page, directly above the header, you can now see a button bar used for navigation, whose content may depend again on the fact that the user has logged in or not, so we can hide options not available to unregistered and not logged in users. Using this bar, unregistered and not logged in users will be able to create a new account or log in, while others will be able to get full access to every section of the site.
Please note that some buttons actually open a sub-menu instead of directly pointing somewhere: in these cases you'll be able to select a choice from the drop-down menu that appears under the menu bar. In every case, leaving your mouse cursor over each option, you'll be able to see a short description.
Internet Explorer users (unfortunately only them) will be enabled to an additional feature, making the menu bar "sticky": when they scroll down the page, the navigation menu will be always present at the top of the viewed area, being available everywhere.
However, this new menu includes any features that you were used to find in the "La Tana dei Goblin" block, at the top of the left column, with the addition of language choice now available halfway down in the right column. As we mentioned before about the page header, all these blocks will be kept active for a short test period, then we're going to remove them and make even more space available.
Your support
Your opinions are important for us, especially if you can help us finding troubles and malfunctions in the new features just released. So, we invite you to start using these new components right now, from the page header and the navigation bar.
For clarifications, feedback and problems with these features, please refer to our Forum area, under the section "Accesso e Navigazione/Login and Navigation" that you can reach directly here, and don't worry if most of posts are in italian language, we're going to answer in english too!
Finally, we hope that you have some spare time to vote these new features in this poll...
