The main aim here is for this site to be read as easily as a book but with the added advantages that computer technology brings.
Every page has a brand in the top left corner to let you know where you are. Each page has two sub pages, to meet the needs of larger computer screens available these days, to provide readability, so they line up side by side on wide screens and vertically on narrower screens, like on a mobile phone. When the latter happens, the header converts to a menu inside a button in the top right hand corner.
The home page is the top level as would be expected. The header has links to About, Structure and Bio, which are all at the home page level and thus have the same level of access to all of the site. On these pages the home link at the top right is active, but you don't have to go back to the home site to navigate elsewhere.
Also in the home level header are links to Geoff Pointer and Frank Zappa, which are the two main content sections of this site. As you move from these areas into their sub levels, links will appear in the header enabling you to move back up. You will always be able to jump from one main section to the other or back to the home page from the links at the top right, or at the bottom of the top right menu button if the page has collapsed to vertical form.
You click on Bio, and read some, you click on Geoff Pointer and find, in the body of the page, descriptions and links for all sections relevant to his own music career. You click on Turbulator, the current name of his band, to find out about his recent exploits and plans. You see that the page you came from is now linked in the header. You click on Cordelia to find about his tracks on Cordelia Records albums and you see that both the Turbulator page and Geoff Pointer page are linked in the header, so you can go back up one level to the Turbulator page, two levels to the Geoff Pointer page, or, from the top right, jump to the Frank Zappa page, or skip the lot and go all the way back to the Home page.
A more sophisticated system for playing music will come much later, when I'm ready.
For now song links default to open in their own window, with whatever is your system's built in mp3 web player.
The book idea of course is better suited to my education subdomain, which is structured around articles in various subject areas. Here the structure is more varied, depending on what's being presented and it's less like an academic journal. So, I've had to work a bit harder to get this web site together.
None the less, similar principles do apply. Having worked with my original setup of this new format, I've found that certain things could be done much more efficiently to allow smoother additions of new pages as new material is produced. I've just completed a significant rework and have stopped using menus in the nav bar at the top, because they were growing in length and becoming unwieldy on small devices. I'm now using links on the lead page of each section instead. I'm still using the same old buttons for stepping through multiple paged sections and the end result is very readily usable on various sizes of hand held device.
There are actually two pages per web page. This is because most computer screens are quite wide these days and filling them with text makes for difficult reading, so two pages display side by side. As either the window of your browser, or the screen itself, narrows, adjustments are made automatically until eventually, the nav bar at the top collapses into a menu button and the two pages line up vertically.
It seems there are some bugs in the version of bootstrap package that I'm using, because this menu doesn't display very well when there are a larger number of items in it. My latest rework has obviated this problem.
I'm still using lists of links for things like the tracks of an album and I've designed my own play button, which currently only opens a window to either a YouTube page, if it's one of my videos, or an mpeg player, if it's one of my album tracks.
An example of how the current setup works: Start on the home page and click on Geoff Pointer. This page links to nine topics, directly from the body of the main page. Click on the arrows for the YouTube section. This page has seven topics, six of which link to their own sections and the header has a link to go straight back to the Geoff Pointer page. Click on the arrows for one of the linked topics and you'll find a list of related video links in the body of the page. Here, the header has links to go straight back to the YouTube page or all the way back to the Geoff Pointer page.
Meanwhile, at all levels in the Geoff Pointer section, links to the Frank Zappa section, or right back to the Home page, can be found on the right of the header. This works the other way around when you're in the Frank Zappa section.