Toolbar for Electric Scotland

[Alastair]

We are playing around with a new toolbar for the Electric Scotland site. When you visit any page it will appear at the foot of the web page and will scroll down as you move down the page.

We think it offers some benefits for our visitors but right now it only seems to work with non IE 8 browsers. I'm not yet sure if this is specific to Windows 7 or whether it's just that version of the browser.

Anyway... I have a query in to the company that does it and if they can fix the problem we are considering adding it to this community as they do offer a special version for it.

It gives you the ability to link to Facebook and Twitter, has a site search box, reports how many visitors are online, gives you a chat facility and can even translate any page into numerous languages.

I'd be interested in your comments as to what you think about it as if you find it of value and we can get it to work reliably then we'll certainly look at adding it in here.

Alastair

[Papa Bear]

Re: Toolbar for Electric Scotland

It is NOT OS Specific but Browser Specific (I have determined)

[Euan]

Re: Toolbar for Electric Scotland

Al, i don't use Facebook or Twitter much, but if it adds someething extra for others and it causes no problems, i don't have a problem with it. The way i see it, the more on offer to members and visitors, the more people will come in even if it's just for a look.

[Marie]

Re: Toolbar for Electric Scotland

I don't have Facebook and Twitter either..

Do I need it?

[Alastair]

Re: Toolbar for Electric Scotland

You don't need to have either Euan and Marie to use some of the options. Like you can use the search, translation of a page, subscribe to our RSS feed and get some stats to see who's visiting the site. The recent posts I note bring up our What's New page. They are also going to add a comments system so you can leave a comment about any page on the site.

I do note however that if you want to use chat it does seem that you have to belong to one of the social networks. I just took another look at that and chat didn't actually appear until I signed in to Facebook. I'll have another look at that.

Alastair

[Ranald]

Re: Toolbar for Electric Scotland

Sorry, but I wish the option to turn it ON of OFF.

Unfortunately I use MS IE 8........

Ranald

[Alastair]

Re: Toolbar for Electric Scotland

On the extreme right hand side of the toolbar there is an icon that can minimize it Ranald.

When you say unfortunately does that mean you have problems viewing it? At the moment in can only be viewed on our index page as I'm having problems replicating the fix to the whole site.

Alastair

[Ranald]

Re: Toolbar for Electric Scotland

When I first looked at the 'toolbar'. the double arrow did not do what you suggest... but it worked when I went on just now !!

For what it is worth, you may be interested to know....

That after minimizing the 'toolbar', I logged off
Then used another web site
Closed that down
Then started AOIS again and the 'toolbar' was still minimized. A nice touch...

That suits me, and I will go along with that.

The work that Steve and yourself have, and are doing, is much appreciated.

Regards

Ranald

[Alastair]

Re: Toolbar for Electric Scotland

I can reorganize the toolbar and in fact have just done so as I kept getting the connections coming up anytime I moved towards the start button with the browser up on the sceen. That's now been moved to the right.

I also got a phone call from someone who is a native French speaker and is also fluent in English and Spanish. He tried the page translation option for me and said he thought it did a very good job on translating our index page to both French and Spanish. Not perfect but he classed it as very good.

The stats are also quite interesting as it tells you how many people are visiting right now and where they are from. It seems to refresh every 20 seconds or so. It also shows the top 3 pages that are being viewed which is also interesting in a way. I noted some were reading our children's stories. Apparently if we went with their pro version we'd get a lot more information but I want this all settled down and working with all browsers before I decide on that.

I also want to announce it in our next newsletter so hopefully more folk will give their feedback on it.

I also quite like having the site search which by default searches our site but you can toggle it to search the web. There is a version of the toolbar specifically for our community so we may also look at that.

Thanks for the feedback Ranald.

Alastair

[Kelly d]

Re: Toolbar for Electric Scotland

This came up straight away for me and connected to Facebook and Chat.

[Alastair]

Re: Toolbar for Electric Scotland

Good to know Kelly. I've added a link button to it which brings up some of our key menus. I'm going to look at this further as it appears I can add additional links which would mean I could make some of our sub menus more visible.

Alastair

[Kelly d]

Re: Toolbar for Electric Scotland

I think it is a great idea to have the major menu links there. It may work across the top up here but Steve would need to move the 2nd line up to the 1st. It would still remain only two bars to work from.

[Papa Bear]

Re: Toolbar for Electric Scotland

Figures...The lass works with it and it works <grumble - Grumble>

[Alastair]

Re: Toolbar for Electric Scotland

I note their is a YouTube video about using the toolbar for chat...

Alastair

[Alastair]

Re: Toolbar for Electric Scotland

I was just sitting watching folk coming in and out of the site through the stats in the toolbar and was quite amazed yet again at the different pages being viewed on the site. Saw someone in the history/Falkirk pages, then children's stories, then in the General history of the Highlands and so on. It kept changing as people came and went. I also noted lots of people were sharing pages through both emails and the social networking sites.