Get Rid Of Those Toolbar Menus!!

Will someone please get rid of those ridiculous JavaScript menus on the toolbar and revert to a static HTML toolbar. The amount of time those things takes to load ties up my browser big time and I cannot even attempt to access these things via my iPhone.

I suspect many just give up and move on. If you hover over them while loading, they never complete the loading until you move off them. Makes the menus look inoperative.

I always thought it was the pictures in the "What we do" section that took long to load and not the menus.

Whatever is holding up the web site from loading, it sure would be nice to be able to click where you are going without having to wait between 30-45 seconds. There must be someone there that can fix this.

I usually get past two if not three of the pictures before the menus will show the triangle and operate the drop-down selections.

Granted. But prospective members visiting the site for the first time, or those members not familiar with this peculiarity, may just move along to the next million BMW portals out there. We're apparently pandering to today's youth, and as the father of three I know some young folk don't have the attention span us old guys do.

And we don't have that long to live to put up with wasting those moments waiting for the website to load.

The menus need to change. They are not accessible via many browsers including smart phone browsers and they take WAY too long to load. Those pics loading every time needs to change as well. There should be an option on the website to load or not load those pics.

With PC's that have limited RAM (less than 1MB) or limited connection speed, the photos and drop down menus are a real killer. IMHO, the BMWCCA website should be designed to maximize access vs features.

It's a bit like trying to visit the Toyota-Scion website. If you're not trendy enough to have the latest computer gadget, high connection speed and relatively lax security settings, you can't access or download. In that case, Scion has "apparently" made the marketing decision that you're not their type of customer, if you can't access the website.

I just visited the Scion site. Loads much faster than BMWCCA.org and without the benefit of a cache. I'm on comcast "high-speed" cable and cca.org's photos load faster than the menu bar. That's not a user-hardware issue.

I expect that many BMW CCA Forum members are like me who now have all bookmarks on all their devices set to open the BMW CCA Forums page rather than the BMW CCA Home Page.

This is a shame, since folks like me seldom see anything beyond the forums. I have probably missed all kinds of announcements, communications and interesting items that most Orgs use their Home Page to broadcast. It's too late though; I'm got my patterns established and my bookmarks are created.

The Home Page IS a huge pain to open; I've tried to open it 4 or 5 times in the past where I've given up and closed my browser and reopened Forums instead of waiting.

FWIW, at home I have a 20 MB/sec connection, but I frequently access the BMW CCA Forums from my Blackberry and occasionally from 3rd party (public) computers.

I think the loading speed of the home page is a valid concern. First impressions suffer. Also, Google is going to start (if they haven't already) taking into account page speed in its page rankings, so this could also affect search result rankings.

I took a quick peek at the source code, and there is plenty of low-hanging fruit to make the home page load faster. A day spent optimizing using the YSlow or Google Page Speed add-ons for Firefox could make a big improvement. Some of these improvements would also cut down on bandwidth, potentially saving the club some money on hosting fees.

it is annoying, my computer likes to lag and freeze when loading webpages like that, I just set my bookmark to the forum but then as soon as I log in it transfers me to the homepage and I have to wait for my computer to catch up before I can go back to the forum

I have been following the above notes with interest. I too have noticed that menu bars load very slow. I am also quite curious as to why none of the webmasters or IT specialists for the Club have not chimed in. I assume they monitor the forums on a fairly regular basis.

When I was attempting to load the Scion site, I was still on dial-up and it was a no-go. That annoyance was compounded by my local dealer (which is also a BMW dealer) who didn't stock any brochures, but referred customers to the Scion website. Luckily, the sunroof/head-liner cover was so flimsy/cheap in the TC coupe, my wife decided she really wasn't interested in the Scion product.

Relative to the drop down menus, the issue could be with the Java-script and the operating system. As I recall, at some point in the life-span of XP and 2000, Microsoft deleted support for Javascript due to patent/copyright issues with Sun. In order to run Javascript with those systems, various downloads had to be performed, installed and updated (frequently). Running Vista and using DSL, I have no problems with the CCA website. On an older machine, with limited RAM and running XP, the CCA homepage is usually a dead zone.

Just my observations.

You used the plural: webmasters. The personnel list shows only one at the current time. Just a guess but maybe they (he?) aren't encouraged to participate here? As I recall, after the Club dumped its last-and-only Web Editor responsible for creating a functioning web presence for the Club (but not before spending enough money on it to support a banana republic for a decade), Steven Schlossman took on the responsibility of creating a bare-bones-but-functional web site using the v-bulletin architecture he uses for his 318ti.org site. We often see Steven replying to comments on this forum, though he's not THE I.T. guy for the Club and perhaps by now regrets even volunteering to create a working site which likely began as an altruistic effort on his part as a long-time-member who only later became a Club employee.

But you're right, the Club administration is too silent on many issues brought up on the Forums. And maybe they're discouraged from participating, or even commanded not to. Most likely they just have more important things to do than to hang out here reading this stuff. But then when was the last time you saw a board member here, either?

Regardless, as an example of how badly the menus work, if you go to the slow-loading home page and select "about us" in the slow-emerging menu list under "BMW CCA", notice how long it takes even then for the same menu bar to become functional again. The triangle selection buttons only appear as the venerable Joe Chamberlain's photo resolves itself. I know nothing about how this black magic works but it would seem a home page should load quickly and then subsequent pages shouldn't have to remake the complete boilerplate with each following page change.

And I'm not on an outdated MS OS, but on Mac OS 10.5.8 using the current version of Firefox and Safari on a MacBook Pro with Intel Core 2 Duo processor...on which the dreaded Scion website loads fine.

Phil,

I should have guessed that you would be a Mac user. However, I too use the Firefox browser and find that it facilitates loading of the CCA website relative to MS IE. Relative to my system, it's a Dell box that gets changed-out every three years for about $700. Pretty cheap and rapidly obsolete.

I'm not worried about my use. I'm used to it and just wait without the cursor over the menu and it loads fine, eventually. I'm worried about those who don't know how it works, or don't know not to hover over the menu, or what to expect at all and just move on.

Please let the webmaster know about these issues. Thanks.

webmaster@bmwcca.org

Umm, that's what this forum is for:

Are we in the Firesign Theatre Department of Redundancy Department?