Happy New Year! Thanks For Your Support in 2020, And A Note About Our Top Menu Bars

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– Posted on December 31, 2020

From all of us at the Curbside, I’d like to wish you a very happy and healthy new year. 2021 can only be better than 2020, so there’s a lot to look forward to, especially as life increasingly resumes normalcy.

2020 has been a very successful year at CC, as our stats are up a solid 11%, and our ad revenue is up very significantly, which allows us to operate with greater enthusiasm and commitment and allows us to share some of that revenue in ways that are most beneficial to the site. Thank you all for your support, especially those that have become premium members.

I’d also like to mention that we’ve embarked on a program to improve the organization and accessibility of our ever-growing archives. This is quite a challenge, as the sheer volume is a lot to manage. This will be an on-going effort, but a couple of first steps have been taken.

There are now two upper menu bars. The top bar (shown here inside the yellow lines) contains general site related items, including site info, our privacy policy, premium ad-free membership, e-mail subscriptions, registration and Log-In.

The lower bar is now dedicated to accessing content. Unlike the manually generated (thanks to Eric703!) archive portals on the right side bar, these upper menu portals utilize categories and subcategories that these posts have been assigned. Since we did not have a consistent structure set up in the first place, that means that old posts are having to be edited with these new categories.

After Home, the “Archives” button brings up our existing category menu that correspond to the archive portals on the side bar, in other words, it duplicates that. And “Recent CC’s & Histories” accesses those categories by chronological order.

Then come three new menu buttons. The “New Car Reviews” accesses our quickly growing archive of superb reviews by Jim Klein and others, organized by brand.

“Vintage Reviews” accesses our archive of over 500 vintage magazine reviews, but with two levels of categorization. The first level is by decade, and then by the major brand categories: GM, Ford, Chrysler, Other American Brands, European Brands and Asian Brands. This should make browsing a lot easier, as well as finding a specific review, although using the site search by Google is always going to be the quickest way to find a specific post.

“Junkyard” accesses our growing archive of junkyard finds by Jim Klein and others. At this time, it’s just chronological.

“CC Cohort” is the link to the Cohort Flickr page, where finds are posted. I would encourage more of you to post your finds there, as I peruse it regularly to select the most suitable ones for posting at CC.

All of this is just a start. Some of the archives (like GM) on the right side bar are getting too long, so we’ll probably create more for specific brands, and reduce their size by eliminating the images. These archives are created manually, thanks to Eric703, and we may likely also start categorizing new posts in such a way to create self-generating menus like the ones on the upper menu bar. That would mean overlap, unless we can find ways to batch-edit our massive trove of the old archived posts to bring them into a new system. It’s an ambitious goal, but for the long term, we need to try to make menus more autonomous.

And ideally we’d have more menus for other categories that are not currently archived, but that may take a while.

CC has become a vast storehouse of quality content, and although it’s all accessible through the search bar, the goal is to make browsing easier, as I know from the stats that the current archives are browsed quite regularly. It’s something to keep us busy in 2021, as we embark on our 11th year of curbsiding.