Need ideas for news archive naivgation.
Hello all. My site has a news article section and I am struggling to figure out a good navigation for the archive. Right now what I have is that when you click the link to "News/Announcements Archive" it takes you to a man page that will load the last 5 news snippits on the mian content area and then at the bottom is a baisc calender table so you can click a link for each month of a particular year and get a page with all the snippits from the news taht month.
To me this looks bland and as it sits on the bottom of the page kind of hard to find and navigate. I tried looking around for some inspiration but I guess I can't find the right search terms becasue what I usally find is not relavant or really old articles with mosly broken images. I am hoping that maybe you guys might have some good ideas or sites I can look at for some inspiration of a good system that would work in both mobile and desktop.
If you want to see how it currently looks you can at https://www.ffinfo.com/news/ and if this is out of scope for this I appologize and will remove.
6 Replies
My advice is to use a select dropdown or datepicker for selecting the time range of the news, and then display last 4 with with show more buton.
I like that, simple and eligant. But would that not get a big list after a few years for a dropdown? Maybe the Datepicker you suggested would fix. I will need to look into Datpicker systems.
Well it all depends how much news you have.
The other solution would be a page with ALL news and included filter at the top and a pagination at the bottom. This is most common practice.
The article amount varies month to month. I like your idea of doing 4 at a time with a show more button. I was more talking about having the drop down for picking a month/year to look at. Each year would be 12 entries in the dropdown so after a few years that would be a long list.
Then you use datepicker as date range for filtering news, or add 2 filter dropdowns-one to choose a year from and the other to choose a month. Just don't overcomplicate. The user who is loking for an article knows exactly what to look for, thats why the dropdowns must be simple as possible since users usually use (what a nice choice of words haha )a search bar to find something by the name.
Agree. I am going to look into the datepicker method. The site will have a search function (once I build it out) so I think your suggestion of the datepicker will provide a nice secondary method to find the older news.