Herping Virginia's Online Guide is Reorganizing

Reorganizing

Hello all, this is Ty. You may have noticed I am working on making big changes to our online guide. This is to streamline useage and building, as well as updating information. There are some issues I wanted to correct to our guide pages.

1. Updating was very time consuming and limiting. Changing the order of species or adding species took a while. 
2. Maps and photos with similar names were getting interchanged on the back end by the program. If I uploaded a photo to the website of a skink and it was titled "179.img" from an old computer and put it on a profile it was fine until I uploaded a image of a turtle also named "179.img" to another profile from a new computer. Then all images were converting to the last uploaded image, but I could not see it in the editor view. They would show as the images that were uploaded.
3. Species photos and maps were seperate photos, which means loading time could be quite long on long pages.
4. The mobile view was not great... 
5. The ever-growing list of Salamanders made scrolling tedious.
6. It was not looking as modern as it used to. 

So, to fix these issues we decided to move to what I call a "tile format". Gone are the buttons. Each tile is to link to the species profile once one is created for that species. Now, changing the order species appear in is as simple as moving a photo. 

This makes pages half of the number of photos to load. Desktop view is ~4x shorter and mobile pages is ~2.25x shorter. It also looks cleaner on mobile. This does sacrifice the "quick info" such as size and subspecies, but this information is on the profile pages. I am also giving up the scale of commonality and will just color code DWR's Species of Greatest Conservation Need listings. The scale is kinda ambiguous (ex. Peaks of Otter Salamanders are very abundant on some slopes and absent on other slopes of the same mountains), and DWR's ranking should show some level of how abundant a given species is. These pages will also be organized in a phylogenetic order more so than before. There are several ways to draw cladograms to make such orders, but I will show the ones I have created to give us our orders. 

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Frogs

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Salamanders