Website & Forum Suggestion Box

[85lebaront2]

Yes that does

Gary, on your parts lists, do you have the cab mounts? I had a question this morning, it was for a newer truck, but the question as to differences in the rear mounts, regular, extended or crew would at least have let me tell him whether the crew and extended were the same or different.

[Gary Lewis]

Gary, on your parts lists, do you have the cab mounts? I had a question this morning, it was for a newer truck, but the question as to differences in the rear mounts, regular, extended or crew would at least have let me tell him whether the crew and extended were the same or different.

Bill - What I have on the website is here: Suspension & Steering/Body Mounts. See if that answers the question.

And, by the way, I found it by scrolling to the bottom of the page and typing "mounts" in the Google Custom Search line.

[85lebaront2]

Bill - What I have on the website is here: Suspension & Steering/Body Mounts. See if that answers the question.

And, by the way, I found it by scrolling to the bottom of the page and typing "mounts" in the Google Custom Search line.

Thanks, I will send him to your site. He actually has a 1997 crew cab. Do I need to get under Darth and measure them?

[Gary Lewis]

Thanks, I will send him to your site. He actually has a 1997 crew cab. Do I need to get under Darth and measure them?

Are you saying my site doesn’t have what you want? Maybe I misunderstood. Part numbers for crew cab? Maybe I can add them from the parts catalog. But measurements would be great.

[Gary Lewis]

Are you saying my site doesn’t have what you want? Maybe I misunderstood. Part numbers for crew cab? Maybe I can add them from the parts catalog. But measurements would be great.

The catalog appears to say that regular, super, and crew cab trucks all used the same mounts. So, if you can confirm that by measuring Darth's I would appreciate it.

[85lebaront2]

The catalog appears to say that regular, super, and crew cab trucks all used the same mounts. So, if you can confirm that by measuring Darth's I would appreciate it.

Gary, this new clown skyfei9 needs to go back into whatever hole it crawled out of. All he is doing is trying to sell overpriced tennis shoes.

[Gary Lewis]

Gary, this new clown skyfei9 needs to go back into whatever hole it crawled out of. All he is doing is trying to sell overpriced tennis shoes.

Sorry. He and his posts are gone. But I don't know how he got in.

[Ford F834]

Sorry. He and his posts are gone. But I don't know how he got in.

Gary, I have been having a hard time coming up with website suggestions because it is already elegant and simple, and any change seems to go against that.

However, there is a problem that I want to bring up, and hopefully brainstorm to improve the site...

On several occasions I have seen a question on the Facebook groups and posted a link to Garagemahal. The responses I am getting are “I knew about the site but I had no idea it had all this”. Sometimes I even post another link in the same thread and get the reaction again. Bottom line, people are not exploring the site. When directed to individual pages they are blown away, but they are not finding them because they either can’t find them or don’t know to look.

I don’t think this is for lack of organization. The menu bar is very logical and the categories are intuitive. It’s a near-perfect site index.

I think the problem is that marketers have conditioned us to be lazy. It is hard to get people to even read anymore. Forums are on the decline and Facebook groups are exploding. But you can’t get anyone to read anything without a picture... you see PFA (pic for attention) everywhere so people won’t scroll past the post. We are self-aware of the fact that we have become extremely visual-acclimated. All of our phones use colorful app icons instead of text. My keyboard autocorrect even tries to replace correctly spelled words with picture symbols! I guess where I am going with this is there might be a way to use visually interesting links to entice people to browse and explore the site. I don’t think the menu bar should go anywhere, but I’m wondering if a documentation home page with clickable photo tiles representing the major information categories would entice more browsing than 2-3 tiers of index branches before you actually “see” anything. People still may not know to look for things but if the front end is a little less dry it should help people realize how much is actually there. The psychology of it does not lie. Go to any commercial website and the initial interface is not an alphabetical list. It may have elements of a list, but there will be plenty of visual interest as well.

Thoughts? Ideas?

[Gary Lewis]

Gary, I have been having a hard time coming up with website suggestions because it is already elegant and simple, and any change seems to go against that.

However, there is a problem that I want to bring up, and hopefully brainstorm to improve the site...

On several occasions I have seen a question on the Facebook groups and posted a link to Garagemahal. The responses I am getting are “I knew about the site but I had no idea it had all this”. Sometimes I even post another link in the same thread and get the reaction again. Bottom line, people are not exploring the site. When directed to individual pages they are blown away, but they are not finding them because they either can’t find them or don’t know to look.

I don’t think this is for lack of organization. The menu bar is very logical and the categories are intuitive. It’s a near-perfect site index.

I think the problem is that marketers have conditioned us to be lazy. It is hard to get people to even read anymore. Forums are on the decline and Facebook groups are exploding. But you can’t get anyone to read anything without a picture... you see PFA (pic for attention) everywhere so people won’t scroll past the post. We are self-aware of the fact that we have become extremely visual-acclimated. All of our phones use colorful app icons instead of text. My keyboard autocorrect even tries to replace correctly spelled words with picture symbols! I guess where I am going with this is there might be a way to use visually interesting links to entice people to browse and explore the site. I don’t think the menu bar should go anywhere, but I’m wondering if a documentation home page with clickable photo tiles representing the major information categories would entice more browsing than 2-3 tiers of index branches before you actually “see” anything. People still may not know to look for things but if the front end is a little less dry it should help people realize how much is actually there. The psychology of it does not lie. Go to any commercial website and the initial interface is not an alphabetical list. It may have elements of a list, but there will be plenty of visual interest as well.

Thoughts? Ideas?

Jonathan - Interesting suggestion. And, let's do brainstorm that here for a while.

First though, I do see the explosion of Facebook pages and I even have two myself. But, I don't want to do any problem solving on Facebook. Instead, my pages are just for pointers back to here, meaning this forum and the whole website. That's because long ago I got frustrated with answering everyone's repetitive questions on the same things. That was the impetus for the ill-fated FTE albums which were intended to answer the most oft-asked questions so we didn't have to re-invent that wheel each and every time. And then when the albums didn't work I created this website. But, I do provide links on the various Facebook pages I'm on when questions are asked that this site can answer. On the other hand, there's no way to find previous answers to the same question on Facebook, which is why I don't plan to problem-solve there.

And, as shown on the chart below, people are finding the site. The chart is for Google searches from 1/1/2018 to today, and basically it shows that the "impressions", which means that this site was offered in the results of a search, went from around 300/day at the first of the year to about 1000 today. At the same time the number of people that have clicked on the resulting link has gone from about 20/day to 60/day. Meanwhile, the position within the search results has gone from about 13th to 10th. All of this is synergistic - as people click on our link then the placement moves up in the results, meaning more people will click on the link.

HOWEVER, I agree that while the menu works and is nice and simple, it is a pain to use. Even I, who created it, sometimes have to do an internal search for whatever I need. (Many people don't realize that there's an internal search at the bottom of every page.) So, it would help to have a better way to find things - w/o searching.

So, I like the idea of having a "documentation" page. BUT, it needs to be easily maintained or I may "forget" to do it. I started the site by having a mini-menu on each page, as shown in the example below. But that quickly became hard to maintain as the site went from less than 40 pages to over 400.

Given that, if there was an easy way to see what is available, but one that is maintainable I'd be all for it. Can you point me to an example somewhere of what you have in mind?

[Ford F834]

Jonathan - Interesting suggestion. And, let's do brainstorm that here for a while.

First though, I do see the explosion of Facebook pages and I even have two myself. But, I don't want to do any problem solving on Facebook. Instead, my pages are just for pointers back to here, meaning this forum and the whole website. That's because long ago I got frustrated with answering everyone's repetitive questions on the same things. That was the impetus for the ill-fated FTE albums which were intended to answer the most oft-asked questions so we didn't have to re-invent that wheel each and every time. And then when the albums didn't work I created this website. But, I do provide links on the various Facebook pages I'm on when questions are asked that this site can answer. On the other hand, there's no way to find previous answers to the same question on Facebook, which is why I don't plan to problem-solve there.

And, as shown on the chart below, people are finding the site. The chart is for Google searches from 1/1/2018 to today, and basically it shows that the "impressions", which means that this site was offered in the results of a search, went from around 300/day at the first of the year to about 1000 today. At the same time the number of people that have clicked on the resulting link has gone from about 20/day to 60/day. Meanwhile, the position within the search results has gone from about 13th to 10th. All of this is synergistic - as people click on our link then the placement moves up in the results, meaning more people will click on the link.

HOWEVER, I agree that while the menu works and is nice and simple, it is a pain to use. Even I, who created it, sometimes have to do an internal search for whatever I need. (Many people don't realize that there's an internal search at the bottom of every page.) So, it would help to have a better way to find things - w/o searching.

So, I like the idea of having a "documentation" page. BUT, it needs to be easily maintained or I may "forget" to do it. I started the site by having a mini-menu on each page, as shown in the example below. But that quickly became hard to maintain as the site went from less than 40 pages to over 400.

Given that, if there was an easy way to see what is available, but one that is maintainable I'd be all for it. Can you point me to an example somewhere of what you have in mind?

Gary, first off I have to agree that Facebook for truck info drives me nuts for exactly the reasons you mentioned. I participate because that is where the action is these days, but I don’t particularly like it. I wasn’t suggesting any move in that direction, just comparing the psychology of other media out there.

Emphasizing a “search Garagemahal” function may help people find things since there are now so many pages. As far as a good example of a visual layout, unfortunately I don’t have any particular website(s) in mind as examples. I will have to look for some.

My post may have come off as half-baked, but this morning I linked the ‘86 EVTM to someone who is a member here yet he wasn’t aware that it existed. I have not really thought through any good solutions, I was just trying to put my finger on the why. I may be off base there as well, I’m just brainstorming and hoping to get folks thinking.