English
DeutschThis is a general guide on how to use this website.
One may think to know how to properly use a website is an obvious thing everybody knows, but my experience shows me that most people seem to fail at it or are just very lazy. So for those I write this tutorial to help you to properly navigate this and likely also many other websites, since many websites use or should use this same design philosophy.
I suggest you to just swallow your pride and read this quick guide.
Theory:
1. Main Menu
The top bar with "Blogs Art etc..." is the main menu, it is the most important element and is always visible, no matter where you are on the site. This website is a content management system, you can think of each entry in the main menu as a folder that manages the according content type.
So clicking the menu entry "Blogs" will get you to the blogs section, where there are only blog posts listed, clicking "Art" all the artwork.
The Blogs section is selected by default, since every website needs a starting page and blogs fits quite well, since it is the most regularly updated and features occasional update notices.
2. Sub Menu
The Sub Menu is the menu on the left, it lets you navigate through each subsection and it will change for each Main Menu entry, so you have a different Sub Menu for "Blogs", "Art" and so on. It is in general designed like a folder tree view, so every content that exists is categorized and can be accessed or filtered through this menu.
3. Content Window
The main window in the middle is the content window, it is where the actual sites content will be generated into. First you usually have an overview or preview images, then if you click on an item, it will give you a full view or further preview in case of the art section.
4. Hyperlinks and color coding.
Everything that is a hyperlink meaning everything you can click on that gets you somewhere is color coded in blue, while menu entries are gold, text is white and additional less important metadata such as post date, time, author and titles of info fields.
Practice:
Once you understood the structure of this website, you can start going for the content you want to view. You have to always think about the basics, the website is hierarchical, you always first go to the Main Menu, pick what content you want to view, then go to the Sub Menu and further specify what exactly of the chosen content type you want to view, alternatively you can also look into the Content Window to see if not you already see what you want. In many cases when clicking on a Main Menu item, the Sub Menu already is set on a default setting, which is usually the top most term, so using the Sub Menu is kind of optional though often very useful.
For example you come to duion.com and will by default end up on duion.com/blogs, but lets say you want to go to the free textures like probably most people, so you have to click on "Art" on the Main Menu, since you will not find art in the "blogs" section, the blogs section will only contain blog posts and usually no link below the Main Menu will get you anywhere else than the blogs section.
Summary:
So Always remember to first keep your eyes on the Main Menu, then the Sub Menu, then the Content Window or alternatively Main Menu and then Content Window and only after that you can start to scroll through the content and click on hyperlinks and only if this all does not get you where you want, you can consider using the Search Bar to search for keywords.
This tutorial may sound like satire, but you will be amazed how many people actually do the things here described in reverse, they start with the Search Bar and search for basic things for which they are main entries, which usually fails, because the search function searches through the content for keywords, not the menu entries. The menu entries are always right in front of your eyes, so it is obviously ridiculous to use the search engine to search for them, since the only thing the search results can give you is to place the terms right in front of your eyes, which is already the case by default.
Detailed instructions for each sub section:
Now I will give some detailed instructions on every category specifically, since most categories do things slightly different.
If you don't know what the website or the categories are about, you can visit the "About" page, it will give you a short description on the website and each category.
Lets start:
Blogs:
I tried to recreate traditional internet blog here so the operation should be very intuitive.
Look into the content window, there you will see the title of each blog post with a short summary below, if you want to read the whole article, you have to click on the title and the full blog post will open.
Here the Sub Menu is kind of optional, but useful, if you only want to browse through specific blog posts, alternatively you can set the "items per page" to something higher, so you can display more or even all blog posts instantly in one window. The Sub Menu is like a tag system, but it is set up like a tree and every blog post can only have one tag, which results in the most efficient way to categorize blog posts.
There are two things special about the Blogs Section and this is the Monthly Archive, where I just wanted recreate a monthly archive, since that is what most traditional blogs have and further below that is a list of all the recent comments, since I did not know where else to put it. I use comments to write updates on content mostly links.
Art:
Originally you needed to click on something the Sub Menu for the artwork content like images to display, but I slightly redesigned it, so now you can also click on big banners with preview images to get into every category. I hope this system is now kind of self explanatory, since I also included and image with a mouse cursor that clicks on each category.
If you are an artist who uses for example the texture photos regularly, it is probably more practicable to make a bookmark on for example https://duion.com/art/texture-photos so you can directly jump to the content.
For the textures and 3D models I recommend using them out of Uebergame, where they are already in a game ready format, the files on the website are the source files, in case you want to use them outside of Torque3D.
For the textures and 3D models it may be practical to download them all, but for texture photos you probably better browse them and download them only if you need them, even I prefer to use the website to get the textures, since they are sorted nicely and have an efficient preview system.
Similar to blog posts you can also vary the "items per page" so you can display a lot of preview images at once.
Each art asset page can and often has a description at the bottom with some keywords that can be searched through the search bar, but it is usually not very efficient, but may give you some results, if you search for something special and the Sub Menu categories did not get you what you were searching for.
Games/Uebergame:
The Games section consists of simple web pages and not a content management system, since I did not plan to make that many games, if any at all, so currently it is the homepage for Uebergame. In case I will make more games in the future I may change the entry again to games from where you would need to do one more click to get onto the Uebergame homepage.
The Uebergame homepage should be self explanatory, click the download link to download and play or read the manual, but the manual is also available from an ingame kind of web browser as well.
Communication:
The communication section is similar to the games section and consists of regular web pages.
There are simply links and descriptions on how to get to our Mumble server and IRC channel
Wisdom:
Content management system again, a series of pieces of wisdom I composed over time, kind of like a personal notebook. It has categories, but there is not much content yet, so you can easily view the titles all at once.
Tutorials:
Same as Wisdom, a simple list of tutorials, also has categories, but not a lot of content yet, so no need to use the Sub Menu to navigate, especially as each tutorial entry is already tagged in the title what it is about to avoid confusion. For example tutorials about Linux usually start with "Linux:"
Links:
A simple link list, this category is relatively big, so it may make sense to use the Sub Menu to navigate, but alternatively one can use the "items per page" to just display all links at once and instead of using the sites search bar, one can simply use the build in search function of the browser, that will search for all keywords on the page more efficiently in case you are searching for something specific.
What is a bit special about the link section is, that there is a table with two entries for each link, the left entry is labelled "Title" and clicking on that will direct you to a sub page for each link, with a short review like description and sometimes further links related to the main link. The right table labelled as "Link" is a direct hyperlink where you will instantly get to the linked website. So if you know what you are searching for or the link description sounds obvious you can click on the direct link and if you have no idea what it is about or want to know more, you click on the title to get to the sub page for the link.
About:
The about page is a simple description of this web site and each content type. The main reason it exists is because of legal reasons you are forced to have it, so I used it for the mandatory stuff and additionally I put some basic infos in there, so you can quickly get there from anywhere on the website.
Bonus:
The Search bar:
To use the search bar simply enter some keywords and hit enter, be aware that it will search all content types at once, so the results may be confusing so I recommend using the advanced search. To use the advanced search simply click on "Advanced search" and the menu will open, there you can specify further detailed keywords, phrases etc and importantly you are able to limit the search to a specific content type or language, which often give you much cleaner looking results.
The language selector:
The whole website is designed to be multilingual, I thought I needed to have this feature, but mostly abandoned it, because first I don't have many german visitors and second translating the sheer amount of content is far too much work for me alone, compared to how often if at all it will be read by someone.
Well thats about it, turned out to be more complex than planned, but if you managed to read through all this you are probably an expert now on browsing through duion.com.