Sydney By Ferry website
For a while, I'd been looking for ideas for a website that I could set up to demonstrate that I can do it. One day, it was suggested to me that a great idea would be a page for tourists about Sydney's ferries, because nobody else seems to have done it, and because I grew up with the old ferries as the normal way that you travelled to the city. I've always retained the interest, and although I now live far away from the water, my favourite way to the city is still driving to my nearest wharf and catching a rivercat.
It was a great idea, so I took it up, and Sydney By Ferry is the result. Doing the field research is the best bit.
The website design has never been intended to be anything fancy - just functional, and quick to load on a phone or tablet when you're out and about. The main visual element on each page is a photo of the ferry service that's written up, and they are all my own photography; taking photographs for a fixed format is tricky.
There are so many pages that the site needs a two-level cascading menu. On desktops/laptops, I've adopted a very traditional horizontal menu bar layout, with the second level revealed by hover. On tablets, where hover doesn't work because you don't have a mouse, I use the jQuery plugin DoubleTapToGo by Osvaldas Valutis; the first tap displays the cascaded menu, and the second tap will take you to the page at the dropdown location, or to anything in the cascaded menu. It seems to be reasonably intuitive.
Phones are a bit more tricky. The menu is toggled without any jQuery/jScript by using the Checkbox Hack, but the standard solution has some failings on older devices, which the linked article describes how to fix. There is lots of design guidance out there which says you only need to use the "three bars" icon to identify the menu, because everyone knows what it is - but there are many people that I know who don't know it yet, so I still use words. The second level cascade for the phone menu also uses DoubleTapToGo, with the cascaded menu moved across to the right side of the screen and highlighted, to make it obvious what's going on.
The website still needs more work done on it, apart keeping the content up to date, with a few more pages still needing to be written. What I'd particularly like to do is add Google map integration for the walking directions, paricularly because the best paper maps (from Walking Coastal Sydney) are now mostly out of print, although that will be a substantial task. And credit goes to my research assistant for finding more good coffee shops near ferry wharves (thanks Leona).