Website Navigation
There are nearly 500 individual menu items available to each club on the website. The vast majority of this information is also available to team managers and coaches. A much smaller portion is available to players. (For more info on website access privileges see Help > Access).
For such a great amount of information to be useful, it must be organized in some logical order so that it can be easily found. The tool for organizing info on a website is the menu system. The RML menu system is a "drill-down" approach that consist of three levels. It works from the top down with the options at the lower levels conditional on selections made in the higher levels.
The starting point is the top red menu bar, located immediately above the banner. It represents the main menu bar (level one) and includes seven menus. Reading left to right on the top red menu bar: [Main], [League Info], [Inside The League], [Players/Free Agents], [Registration], [Tools] and [Help]. If you are not logged-in, you will see only five main menus. And if you are logged in as a League Administrator, you will see an 8th menu, [Admin].
To open any main menu, place your cursor on its name. Each main menu opens into a drop down menu listing all choices available on that particular menu. Altogether the seven main menus available to members include nearly 50 separate level one choices. To select any item on a main menu drop-down list, click the name of the item.
The red colored bar immediately beneath the league banner is the level two sub-menu bar, which shows the available sub-menus for the currently selected item on level one. Immediately beneath that is a dark blue menu bar, providing the level three choices available for the currently selected item on level two. When a new level one item is selected, the sub-menus on level two and level three repopulate with new choices conditional on the currently selected level one item. Similarly, when a different level two selection is made, the level three options will repopulate conditional on the currently selected level two item.
The first main menu (level one), aptly named Main, is organized into five level one menu items, 20 level two sub-menus, and nearly 50 level three items. To review: menu selections are always made from top to bottom i.e., level 1 then level 2 then level 3. What you see on level two or three is always conditional on the current selection at all higher levels. If you want to explore all related content for any selection, you can jump around on any of the lower level sub-menus w/o re-selecting any of the higher level choices. Each selection includes a default selection at all lower levels e.g., when a selection is made at level one, the default(s) at levels two and three control what content is first loaded into the browser window (hint: always scroll down the page to see the full content). The "active" level 2 selection is highlighted as a dark blue tab. The letters of the active level 3 selection are yellow.
One of the major advantages of using a tiered menu system is that all levels are always visible to the user. This makes the website easy to explore.
Things to remember, include:
- The menu system works from top to bottom i.e., when you are toggling among level 2 options, the level 1 selection does not change. To change the level 1 selection, the user must open a level 1 menu and select another item. The lower level selections will then change accordingly. When you toggle among items at any level, the higher level choice, if any, remains fixed.
- Always remain cognizant of what is happening on all lower menu bars each time you make a new selection. The trick is to keep reading the colored bars, particularly those on the level below your selection.
- The content of many pages may not seem to display on your screen – most likely this does not mean it didn't load to your browser window, but that you need to scroll down a bit to see the content.
