Online Journal (Magazine) -- Past Issues pages

[aafpitadmin]

We're hoping to restructure the Past Issues pages for the online version of our twice-monthly medical journal.  Right now the Current Issue page (sort of a truncated table of contents) gets replaced twice each month, when a new issue is available.

The current location of for our past issues page is shown below:

Home Page > News & Journals > Journals > American Family Physician > Past Issues

Under Past Issues, there is a page for each year. 2011 - 2010 - 2009 - etc (back to 1998).

Is there an advantage to putting all of the Past Issues on a single page? This would be 24 issues per year, which is just over 250 links on a single page and it would grow by 24 each year.

I'll attach a couple of screen shots of ideas I'm considering. One is an expandable navigation using jQuery for each year, listing all Past Issues on a single page. The other is making the links to the 3 most recent issues available in the left nav across all Past Issues pages.

Do you have other suggestions for how we might structure this?

cydxG.png PDXT9.png

[Tom-Anthony]

I like your second screenshot with the links to the recent issues that persist over all the pages, and think keeping them separated by year makes them easy to navigate for users and easy to crawl for search engines.

I would comment, whilst you are restructuring, that your content is very deep. It seems everything on your site exists at least 2 folders deep:

/online/en/home.html

Given your site seems to be only available in English I don't see the necessity of the 'online' or the 'en' directories.

Secondly, the publications:

/online/en/home/publications/journals/afp/afpsearch.html

Here having 'publications' and 'journals' seems superfluous, and now a 'home' directory has also appeared. Your content is now 6-7 levels down! I'm unsure of what CMS / software is powering the site, but I'm sure this could be changed. So you could have much cleaner, which is much easier:

/journals/afp/search.html

instead of:

/online/en/home/publications/journals/afp/afpsearch.html

Which I think would be much nicer for users and engines.

Best of luck!

[aafpitadmin]

Thank you for the prompt and comprehensive reply! The /online/en/home is structure created by our web content management system. We have a consultant for our CMS coming in next month, so I'll definitely see if this is something we can address.