Material presented on The American Mafia history website (http://mafiahistory.us and http://www.onewal.com/) was gathered through decades of research into the history of American organized crime. A childhood interest in the subject blossomed into a full-time obsession in the late 1990s, when I began organizing collected newspaper clippings, notebook pages and index cards. That effort gave rise to this website in September 2002. The website is more of a process than it is a document. Very often new historical data becomes available and causes old assumptions to be revised or abandoned. Over the past few years, many underworld legends appearing on these pages have given way to more defensible statements. And other revisions are sure to be made in the months and years ahead. It is a pleasure to be able to share my interest with you. I welcome your emailed comments, questions, criticisms. I hope that the site is useful to you and that you check in from time to time to see what is new. Copyright © 2011, Thomas Hunt. All rights reserved.




Sunday, May 23, 2010

New site navigation

As part of the redesign, The American Mafia history website (www.onewal.com) will be eliminating its extensive vertical menu. The menu will be replaced with a page-top horizontal navigation bar for most visitors. The bar contains several submenus and brings pages up in a lower frame.



Top menu selections for Home, Places and Forum will be clickable. Moving the cursor over selections for Site (shown above), Articles, People, Timeline, Media and Sources will cause a small submenu to pop up with between three and six selections in each one. (The navigation bar contains no sub-submenus.)

In addition, each content page will contain a box with small plain-text links to site contents. Those without frames-capable browsers will see only this box (below).


The goal here is to keep all navigation options available at all times, while keeping them out of the way of the main body content.

Launching this blog

I've started this blog in an effort to keep visitors informed of behind-the-scenes happenings on The American Mafia history website (www.onewal.com). At this moment, the website is undergoing another redesign. My hope is to be able to present you a more streamlined and usable site in the very near future.

If you have any ideas for how the site could be made more useful or "friendly," please feel free to share those ideas with me. Email messages can be sent to thunt@onewal.com. You can also find me on Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/tphunt).