About Our Website
ABOUT OUR WEBSITE
Our website is more than a marketing vehicle. It's a place where we share knowledge, information about birding, and Laura's photography. We hope you find it useful and enjoyable, and we hope you'll join us on tour. By exploring our website you can find detailed information about the countries we tour and many of the birding locales we visit in those countries. We provide annotated checklists, lists of target birds, lists of endemic and range-restricted birds, information on abundance, residency or migratory status, and likelihood of seeing various bird species for most places we visit. Our tour pages provide summary information, itineraries, detailed descriptions, descriptions of accommodations where we stay, and other information you'll find useful during your tour planning. We also provide packing lists, planning tips, general travel information, and company policies, all easily accessible from the menus at the top of every web page.
NAVIGATING OUR WEBSITE
We hope navigating our website is intuitive and easy. However, our design is a bit unique, so we're providing notes about it for your reference.
DROP-DOWN MENUS
The drop-down menus at the top of each webpage provide easy access to most content on our website. We tried to make the menu titles self-explanatory, but here is a short summary:
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The ABOUT menu accesses information about our company, our guides, and neotropical birding in general.
The DESTINATIONS menu accesses general information about countries we visit or may visit on our tours. Included is birding and travel information about each country, maps, summaries of tours we offer to that country, and links to birding locales and bird checklists for that country.
The BIRDING TOURS menu provides direct access to information about the birding tours we currently offer.
The PHOTO TOURS menu provides direct access to bird photo tours we currently offer.
The GALLERIES menu accesses images taken by Laura Fellows in the various countries we have toured in the past.
The TOUR.INFO menu accesses information about tour registration and tour policies.
The GENERAL menu accesses miscellaneous information you may find useful or of interest. Tell Me Less
SIDEBAR HORIZONTAL ARROWS
The large horizontal arrows on the sidebar of some pages allows you to change the content of the existing page. An example is on this page. Simply click an arrow to change the content. Swapping content keeps the page organized and allows a person to select display of the information they find of interest.
SIDEBAR VERTICAL ARROWS
To keep the sidebar of our pages concise and uncluttered, we sometimes compress information by making it initially hidden. Wide vertical arrows are used on the sidebar to expand information or links initially hidden when the page is first displayed. Clicking a vertical arrow will reveal the hidden information or links to other pages. Clicking it again will re-hide the information or links. Using clickable arrows in this way makes the sidebar content easier to comprehend with a quick glance.
HIDDEN CONTENT
The content on the main body of each webpage may be concise or it may be extensive. When content is very extensive or some information is of interest only to some visitors to our site, we hide the content from initial view. This hidden content can be seen by clicking the text label of the downward pointing arrow. When hidden text is revealed, the text label of an upward pointing arrow can be clicked to re-hide it. This technique makes it easier to quickly scan information on a page while still making additional information available for those having an interest.
OUR DESIGN GOALS
Over the past several years we've provided increasingly extensive information about our tours and about birding and photography in our destination countries. This in turn caused our previous website design to become overly cluttered, more daunting, and more cumbersome to use. We found that many of our clients were unaware of much that our website had to offer, and many visitors to our site could not easily grasp its content or find what they wanted quickly enough. As a result, we decided to re-design our website to remedy these problems.
Our website was re-designed with you the visitor in mind. We believe most visitors want to quickly grasp what information is available and how to find it. They want to view only the information of interest to them without having to search extensively to find it. When they do find something of interest, they want a quick summary and an easy way to find out more. Making all this possible is the goal of our new design.
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To make content more apparent and easier to access, we added drop-down menus at the top of each page to put information at your fingertips. These menus are organized as simply as possible and are the same on every page so you can get to anywhere from anywhere on our website. To make each page on our website easily and quickly understandable, we display summary information only and hide the details from initial view. On many pages we organized content so only one topic is displayed at a time. We put related content at the visitor's fingertips and allow the visitor to choose the content they want displayed. Finally, when a visitor wants to see more detail, they can do so by clicking a button. When the visitor is done with those details, they put away or hide those details by simply clicking a button for a second time. Tell Me Less
We hope you find our website easier to use, and we appreciate any feedback you care to offer that might make it better still.
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All content and design © 2004-2012 by Exotic Birding, LLC. Original banner photo © Laura L Fellows. All rights reserved. |
| Website designed and produced by Jim Wittenberger and Laura L Fellows. Most photography by Laura L Fellows. |
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