Web Design Question

warrenaldo

I have a page that contains lots of links - it could be anywhere up to 200. At the moment I have them in a ordered list. But its very long.

I will probably put a search at the top of the page to search them - but if not i would like a nice way of displaying all the links.

I looked at tag clouds but its not really suitable - as I need them ordered alphabetically.

Does anyone have any sugestions or even better - a link.

lukin

Dunno what you are using to create the page, if it's ASP.NET then a datagrid might suit?

Giblet

You could try implementing pagination. If it is ASP.NET, you can setup paging via a datagrid as stated above.

NeverSayDie

Yeah, pagination/tabs would do the trick - either numerically or alphabetically (as in, have A.. B.. C.. links at the top of the page). Other options might include moving to a tabular/grid layout - as in, use the page's width and split it into multiple columns, will avoid too much vertical scrolling that way - if you do say 4 columns, you'll only need 50 rows for your 200 links.

You could also look at more clever tricks using AJAX - dynamically update the list as the user types in a search query for instance - like Google's "Suggest" feature.

warrenaldo

Ye, im using Ajax to dynamically update the list - it works well. But its just the fact that the list is vertical. I also have no css on the page as yet. I was just hoping someone could point me at some simplistic looking but slick css that might be nice.

Pagination is not an option on this - I want to show all the options on one page.

Thanks for the help so far.

Eoin

Are they, or could they be categorised? If so, you could use some sort of expanding and contracting layout (accordian / treeview etc).

warrenaldo

No categorys - just a long list. Its more of a design question than a technical question.

NeverSayDie

Might have more luck here;
http://boards.ie/vbulletin/forumdisplay.php?f=23

ron_darrell

Mmmm interesting. You've asked for advice and then ignored it It's a long list. There is no easy way to show a long list if you don't want to use pagination. However you have answered the question yourself in a way. You're already using AJAX to update/create the list. Why not modify the AJAX to create the pagination/categorisation? Add another selector to limit the amount of data to be returned (and also an option to return all of the data for those who want the whole list back).

-RD

W!zard

ron_darrell wrote: »

Mmmm interesting. You've asked for advice and then ignored it It's a long list. There is no easy way to show a long list if you don't want to use pagination. However you have answered the question yourself in a way. You're already using AJAX to update/create the list. Why not modify the AJAX to create the pagination/categorisation? Add another selector to limit the amount of data to be returned (and also an option to return all of the data for those who want the whole list back).

-RD

Adding the pagination mentioned above would only require a few lines added and you can keep it tidy enough, iv used this myself and works great.

warrenaldo

Thanks for the help guys - but pagination is not what i need. Im using it in many other places and it works great. But not in this instance.
im looking more along the lines of a cloud tag type of display. I should have asked in the design/development forum - I will do.

Thanks again.