Mobile-friendly adjustments

We have been working on a number of adjustments to the website in order to make it more "friendly" to mobile device users. 

Changes include less reliance on table formatting, scalable images and typesizes, and larger link buttons. These were prompted by Google's announcement that sites deemed unfriendly to mobile users would be ranked poorly in web searches from mobile devices. But we believe the site generally benefits from a cleaner, more streamlined look.

Even desktop users will find the site easier to use, as most pages will require no specific web browser width - the page contents should size to fit whatever area your browser window is sized to.

As always, we welcome your feedback on these changes and on any other issues you may have with the American Mafia history website.

Some redesigned pages online

Some of the redesigned pages of the American Mafia website ( mafiahistory.us ) have come online. These include the main entrance page, the articles menu page, the Who Was Who menu page, the crimefighters menu page, several articles and about 70 Who Was Who entries.

Visitors are cautioned that the site remains under construction. Not all links will work. Some links are connected to old-style pages.

Many of the old pages contain out of date or incorrect information. These include the original Who Was Who biographies of mob figures that have been indexed by major search engines. While this transition continues, whenever possible, visitors should make an effort to obtain the new pages from the site.

Hinchey report on OC in waste hauling

I've found some time to add significantly to the online presentation of a New York State report on Organized Crime in the Waste Hauling Industry. The online pages can be found through the Gov't Sources menu selection. They can also be accessed directly using this web address: http://www.onewal.com/maf-hinc.html

I hope to be able to add more pages in the very near future.

The website redesign, by the way, continues ... slowly.

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).