Argh Mateys! – we thought it’d be important to post an entirely different kind of blog post today in order to inform everyone about our Online Alarm Clock’s brand new navigation menu.
That’s right: your favorite Online Alarm Clock website now has an actual navigation menu with links to the dozen or so different kinds of online alarm clocks, countdowns, online stopwatches, timers and various other time tools and games we have online.
Unfortunately, up to now, these different clocks have been a bit difficult to discover on our alarm clock website. And of course, that’s entirely our fault, but we thought it’d be a good idea to explain to you why this has been the case, up to now.
With OnlineClock.net we’re trying to create a successful combination of art and commerce.
We’ve discussed our design philosophy several times in depth already, so we’re not going to delve too deeply in the subject now, but…
We do keep advertising on our website down to a minimum, (but of course, like everyone else, we still need to pay our bills.) And this philosophy doesn’t stop there…it also extends to Online Clock’s entire design philosophy.
We’re in contact each week with several fans and users of our Online Alarm Clock site, and some of you ask for additional features.
Additional features are nice, but to us working behind the scenes here at OnlineClock.net, what’s perhaps even more important is keeping the overall design of the website as simple as possible. There are many different reasons why you might want to keep the design of a website simple, and these include:
- it makes the website easier to use
- there is less that could go wrong (fewer bugs)
- it makes the site compatible with a higher number of different web devices and web browsers
- usually you’ll have a faster-loading website if it’s less complicated
- “simple” is just aesthetically pleasing: people just like simple. (look at Apple products as a great example)
We knew that all of our various clocks had been somewhat difficult to find for a long time. Up to now, the best way to access them have been via our sitemap page.
It’s because we wanted to keep everything as simple as possible, including the entire design of the website, we resisted adding a navigation menu for the first four years of our existence.
But now we believe we’ve figured out a way to add a navigation menu without having a negative impact on the design of the site.
What solution did Online Clock come up with?
Well, if you’ll take a look at the upper left hand corner of our main Online Alarm Clock, you’ll see a small clock icon:
And this is what the clock icon actually looks like on our alarm clock website when you have the background color set to green:
Move your mouse over the clock icon to see an expanding menu showing links to almost all of our various online clocks.
We’re especially proud of the fact that the navigation menu is there for those of you who want to use it, but can also be completely ignored by everyone else. In fact, we’re not even sure most of you have noticed it up to now, and that’s one of the main reasons for the blog post you’re reading right now.
Screenshot of our navigation menu when fully extended...
The Online Clock Team has tested our new navigation menu on many different web browsers and many different computer operating systems. But if you happen to find a combination of browser and operating system where the navigation menu doesn’t look right, where it doesn’t behave properly, or where it simply displays some bugs, then please let us know by sending an email to OnlineClock.net’s contact email address found on the bottom of our sitemap page.
Once the nav menu has been online for several weeks and any and all possible ‘bugs’ have been eliminated, we’ll surely go ahead and add it to most of the other pages on our website.
Until then, when you use the navigation menu to take you to a different clock, simply click on the ‘back’ button on your web browser to return to our main page, where you can then use the navigation menu again if you’d like.
A final image of our new navigation menu against an orange-colored Online Alarm Clock
We’d very much welcome any and all comments about the addition of Online Clock’s new navigation menu:
- Do you like it?
- Do you not like it (and, if so, why)?
- Are you discovering all of the various other different online clocks on our website for the first time via this navigation menu, or did you in fact already know they existed?
At any rate, we hope that this is a valuable addition to the internet’s most popular web-based alarm clock website, and one that doesn’t pose a threat to our site’s minimal design and our dedication to keeping our site’s focus more on art than on commerce.
If you were expecting a blog post of an entirely different kind here, don’t worry – we’ll return to our usual informative format later in the week.
Until then, Online Clock wishes all of you “happy navigating“…but now:
Hoist the mizzenmast and keel-haul all the landlubbers!
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