West Press Online 2009! - A Virtual Tour

We have attempted to bring to our visitors a new site that is much easier to navigate, contains fresh information, and is searchable—we want to present a site to our users that is more useful. To achieve this goal, we have commited to use “standards” compliant technology and programming to help ensure that it looks great in every current version browser. We hope that you are pleased with the result.

Let’s look at some of the feaures of West Press Online 2009! Take a look at the picture below, we have highlighted those areas that we will be discussing in the following pages.

Toolbar - Quick Login & Drop-down Menus

Along the top of your browser window, we have tried to organize our main features and content into drop-down menus; we call this area of our site the “toolbar”.

On the left of the toolbar you will find a “quick” login mechanism for our site members. Let’s look at it up close:

We have located the quick-login in this upper left corner for convienience. Membership on our site is free. You must be a site member in order to upload your files to us. We may eventually offer additional benefits to site members in the future. Becoming a site member is simple. To begin, click the create new account icon and fill out the user details form. Note that there are icons for retrieving forgotton passwords and usernames. Reminders will be emailed to the address on file for that account. Please relate any difficult experiences to us regarding this mechanism and we will assist you.

The rest of the menu items to the right of the quick login component comprise our main drop down menus, directing users to topics and sub-topics that appear when you hover over them:

• News - We have divided this into four sub-topics of news as it relates to those topics:
• Events & Training - This is where you will find infomation on upcoming events, training opportunities or resources, as well as training videos.
• Resources - Helpful information and resources for ourselves and our users such as frequently asked questions (FAQ), resources to help make our jobs a little easier, etc. You will also find links to websites with additional resources here.
• Services - This menu and its sub-menu items will direct you to information regarding our services and products.
• Contact Us - The name says it all. This is your standard contact form for sending us feedback, comments, etc. Look here for phone and address information too.

All buttons/menu-items are clickable, Explore!

Bread Crumbs & Search

Underneath the toolbar and logo area you will see a breadcrumb area on the left, and a search field/button on the right. The breadcrumb area provides a trail for users to quickly navigate back to parent levels of the site by clicking on the name. This can be a very handy feature. The search field/button (the magnifying glass is the button in this case) provides a mechanism to allow users to quickly search for content within our site. This can be news, articles, whatever.

To the right of the search component, you will also see a “plus” and “minus” sign. This feature allows users to dynamically adjust the size of the text to help make it easier to read. A side affect of this feature is that is will ruin the default “flow” of the site as images may shift or blocks of text re-arrange to accomodate the changing text size. This is not a problem with the site but a product of the feature.

Main Content Area

Below the breadcrumb and search components, users will see the main content area of the site with some additional menu components to the right.

On the home page of our site, you will see this newsflash slider component featuring noteworthy content we would like you to know about first and foremost. Simply hover your mouse over the image to see the content next to it. There will almost certainly be a link (i.e., “Learn More”) that will direct you to more information about that news item. The main content area of the site will contain teaser blocks of content, main articles, or more depending on the menu item or link clicked.

Menus - Main, User, etc.

The menu components to the right of the main area comprise the “Main Menu” and possible other menu components below it.

The main menu component contains:

• Request a Quote - Users are presented with our RFQ form
• Company Publications - An area of our site that contains newsletters and other West Press publications
• About Us - View information about our company and select members of our staff. Learn about industry awards that West Press has earned. Read about our employee ownership program and community service projects. Prospective employees may also look for job opportunity information here.

When you are logged into the site, you will see a “User Menu” just below the main menu. The user menu component will contain links to member only areas of the site such as the file manager for transfering files to-and-from West Press.