Yeah, I'm afraid the WebCams page got the boot (for now). Many resorts took their web cams down over the summer, so I decided to wait until closer to the season to "reintroduce" that feature. My plan is to incorporate a Web Cam section directly into each resort's individual Resort Profile on DCSki, but I may also have an integrated Web Cam page available off of the top-level Ski Resorts page, similar to before.
(In the meantime, a little birdie told me that the old Web Cams page is hiding
here. But it has been deprecated.)
In terms of adapting to the new navigation, if you have used DCSki for a number of years, it does take awhile to undo old "muscle memory." I find that I am still instinctively going to certain areas of a page where links used to be. Having said that, I spent a lot of effort thinking about the new design and trying to re-engineer it to reduce the time/clicks it takes to get to key features. For new users, in particular, I believe the new layout is much more conducive to naturally exploring the features of DCSki.
Here are a few tips:
Spend a few minutes navigating through the different sections of the site, using the new main menu. The main areas are Home, News, Ski Resorts, Community, Events, Weather, and About DCSki.
Within each of these areas, you will find sub-menus. For example, Ski Resorts has sub-menus for Resort Profiles, Map, Lost Ski Areas, and Lodging Finder. If you explore each of these areas of DCSki, I think the grouping and hierarchy will make sense and you'll be able to navigate more quickly.
There are some shortcuts. You'll see a "Jump To:" popup menu in the left column of most DCSki pages, and that contains a laundry list of features similar to DCSki's old main menu. You can also quickly jump to a specific Resort Profile using the direct links found later in the left column (below the ads).
I have also enhanced DCSki's search engine. For example, if you enter part of a resort's name in the "Search DCSki" field, the top of the search results will contain a sidebar containing key stats for that resort and a quick link to the resort profile. (Below the sidebar will be matching news articles.) For example, try typing "Whitetail" or "Canaan".
There are other tricks scattered about. You can always click on the DCSki logo to return to DCSki's home page. On the home page, click on the weather icon to view a more detailed forecast. (If you haven't checked out DCSki's weather forecasts before, give them a try -- they include a "snowmaking predictor" which I find captivating this time of year! There's also the exciting opportunity for colossal parsing errors, as the National Weather Service occasionally tinkers with the format of their data. So some weather forecasts could be quite amusing.)
One last tip: if you use an RSS news reader/aggregator, you can find an RSS feed to DCSki's top news stories
here. Currently only headlines/abstracts are shown, with a link to the article page. If time permits, I plan to expand RSS support on DCSki, but that is probably some months away.
