Awkward title I know, but I have been pressed to find a solution.
So, I recently showed the 3.0 version (I’ve been working on 5.0’s Layout) of the Recycling Site to my boss, and she liked it. She proceeded, with my guidance, to edit text for sake of political correctness and brevity and came to a dilemma.
She loved all the information I had put on the site and acknowledged its noteworthiness as information for our audience, but it was a lot of text. We agreed that users would become bored and overwhelmed with all that text blocked in there, but really there was no other way we could efficiently say what we needed to say. Plus she didn’t really want to dry up the reading either, because short readings with matter-of-fact, no conversational-ism tones are just the same as informal, friendly manuscripts, in the way that they quickly lose the reader’s attention.
I want to keep the cleverness of the explanations, and altogether the explanations themselves, because it puts our ‘Recyclers’ in our shoes, and gives good insight, but it is a lot to throw at a user wanting ‘quick’ and ‘easy’.
We decided that we will use short header statements that briefly describe what’s going on and that we wouldn’t delete the text, rather hide it, and have a link like ‘Full Explanation Here’. The link when clicked will fill a hidden layer just below it, a placeholder div with nothing in it, not one that changes display states, will expand to fit the text. Then all the details will be viewable along with a link at the bottom of the expanded div saying ‘Hide’.
I know I can do this in Javascript and it would easy to implement, but now my problem is this. What about people who don’t have or use Javascript? What other options do I have in this case? The only degradable solution that I can come up with, with my lack of scripting languages, is to set all the text as display for non-script users, but then again what if they get bored?
Remember I have to design this site in consideration of the complete idiot, with nothing too complicated for their education levels. In other words if they had to, a user could just click around the site and see everything and not have to worry about installing, enabling, and things.
My boss wants the functionality, but she wants everyone to be able to use it. What do I do? :crying:
Thanks in advance,
