New look

Freshened the look of the site for 2008 with a different color scheme and border. You may need to refresh some pages to see the changes.

2000 Symposium pics

Nick Valenziano (Nix) kindly sent some photos from his visit to the White House Symposium in 2000, which include a couple of rare shots of restrooms as well as a nice one of the China display cases and a really, really nice one of the Family Theater. Thanks, Nick!

Simultaneously, I have begun (on the Ground Floor) adding little maps to each room page—snippets of the floor plan—to help orient the reader about where the doors and windows and fireplaces are in that room.

New menu navigation

I've completed the conversion to the new menu navigation system. Now, all pages have menus that drop from the existing buttons. With this, you can get to any floor in the Residence, East Wing, or West Wing immediately.

You may need to refresh some pages to get the new functionality.

New navigation and menus

I've posted new pages for the West Wing and East Wing, breaking out the floors separately from the overview as for the Residence. This is preparation for implementing new menus for each section, as on the test page.

Update: I've begun converting the pages to the new menu navigation. So far, all the "top level" pages are converted (intro and floor plans).

Update: All done.

More menu experiments

I found what I think is a better menu method for enhancing navigation and experimented with it on a new test page. This keeps my buttons and just adds drop-down menus from them, which looks good and is very slick. I haven't created separate pages for the wings, so those links go to the Residence right now. It will be a bit easier to implement this code than it would have been to implement the other.

I found the code here.

Menu experiment

I started experimenting with a new navigation menu I found. I'd like to convert to new, more dynamic navigation to better enable users to get to the floor they want in the part of the mansion they want (I'd create separate pages for each floor of the East and West Wings.

Here is my experiment page, not quite laid out right. The code to do this would be a pain to add to every page, so I'm looking for something that I might be able to do in a streamlined way (with a couple of carefully-constructed find-and-replace functions).