Lightbox!

I got some useful feedback from the presentations on Tuesday, and have been mulling them over since.

One thing which I really did not like about my site was the way in which the charts operate as an object within a page.  Maria solidified this for me, and after some discussion with Pippa we worked out that the best way around this would be to have the charts displayed in a stand-alone way, which will prevent the website from distracting the user while the display is in progress.  It will also mean I can design the charts to optimise the user's experience, rather than having those needs compete with the factors which constrain the site's design.

A friend found me a very nice Lightbox plugin for Wordpress - Lightbox Plus - which allows you to display any kind of content in a modal window overlaying your current page.  Modal windows are child windows, which appear over the usual graphical interface of a program, and disable interaction with the parent until the modal is dealt with (eg. error messages).  In website design, the most familiar implementation of this is a Lightbox, traditionally a javascript-implimented window which overlays the current page in order to display highlighted content - usually high-resolution versions of photographs.

I love lightboxes - they allow you to explore visual content in all their glory, without being restricted by fitting within a website's design.  By fading the website behind the content their location and route back to the website is clear, but all that 'spatial' information fades as the user is invited to concentrate on experiencing the content which they have selected. 

I had been using iframes anyway, and this plugin purports to work with them, so it's time to give it a go, using these demos.