Goodbye Submenus

As part of my initial site re-design, we applied sub menus to the navigation panel. As MrNussbaum.com is an extremely deep site, I wanted to make sure all users were able to view the available subjects and interactive content level-pages. Thus, when users scrolled over the menu, drop-down sub menus appeared with an image and dozens of other links within the site to related pages. While in theory this should have been a good idea, in practice, it turned out unsuccessful according to many who use the site.

On Tuesday, you may have noticed some service interruptions as I disabled the submenus. The submenus were causing various user experience user experience problems:

* For IE 8 and IE 9 users, some flash games would literally disappear if a student scrolled over the menu. Sometimes it would return and sometimes it would not return upon moving the cursor away from the menu.

* The menus and all of its links and scripts caused problems with server load, resulting in a slow experience for many users.

* Younger users had problems avoiding the menus and became frustrated when trying to play a game or complete an activity.

* The turn off menu option worked in some browsers, but not others.

Anyhow, I hope the removal of the menus make the experience of using MrNussbaum.com more enjoyable. I may again try to employ them in the future if I can figure out how to fix all of the bugs.