Redesign of Catalyst Online Help

If you're a frequent user of this part of MSI's website, you may have noticed a few changes recently. So far, the changes to the Catalyst Installation Guide and Catalyst Tutorials have been superficial enough not to break any hyperlinks or bookmarks that you have. I know this documentation needs more work (especially the graphics!), but my aim is to give the entire Catalyst documentation set a quick face-lift before doing more time-consuming improvements.

However, the set of Catalyst On-Line Help documents is a different story. The underlying structure of the site is poor (must have been designed back when "the web" was in its infancy), and I have to change its architecture to improve its usability. So, inevitably, some of your direct links and/or bookmarks will get broken. (I am allowing orphaned files to remain in the website for now, to minimize this problem.)
I have two purposes at this point: reducing the number of clicks before you arrive at a page containing content, and rationalizing the order in which items are displayed on all the pages.

More extensive restructuring and improvement of the entire Catalyst documentation set will happen after all of it has been brought up to acceptable standards.

I of course want the Catalyst documentation to meet your needs with respect to both finding and displaying information. For example, a quick analysis of the access logs for our web server shows that most of you are using Netscape 4 and Windows NT to view the Catalyst documentation. Almost all of you are using version 4 or higher of Netscape or Internet Explorer. But some people (<1.4% of you) are still using Netscape 3 as a browser. I'll take this into consideration while working on the Catalyst documentation.

However, the type of information that can be gathered from the server's access logs is very limited. For example, there is no way to follow an individual user through the site (to help see where its organization may be confusing), because most of you access our website via a proxy and/or gateway server. So... suggestions and feedback happily received! Please send email to marj@msi.com

Marjorie Tiefert
Principal Scientific Writer and Documentation Website Manager
Molecular Simulations Inc