Strap in, we are going for a ride through the site. Hopefully we won't end up like the driver in the accompanying photograph that I took at my local beach a few years ago!
First, it will help if you understand that the change in site navigation has been caused by a major change HealthUnlocked introduced to help those that are members of more than one community. We now have two menus, the top green menu bar for the Health Unlocked site and a secondary lower menu bar with a colour set by the specific community (purple in our case). This helps you quickly recognise which community you are in if you have more than one membership.
The top (Green) menu items are:
HealthUnlocked, Login/Profile Image + Username, a Private Message icon (envelope), Communities, Help and Search
Once you've logged in, you'll see Login replaced by your Profile Image/Avatar + your username. A red dot containing a number may appear in the envelope to the right of your username. This just shows how many unacknowledged Private Messages you have waiting from other members in all your HealthUnlocked communities. Click on the envelope icon to go to your Inbox, then either click on Communities in the green menu and select the community to which you wish to return to, or click on your username in the green menu and select News Feed to see what's been happening in all your communities.
Most of us are only members of the 'CLL Support Association' community. When you click on that, you'll get the secondary CLL Support Association purple menu and a 'Latest activity' page. This is much the same as the 'News feed' page, but only shows you recent activity from our community. You can either click on an item of interest or on a member's name. In the latter case, you'll see what that member has decided to share about themselves as well as recent activity by that member.
Clicking on the Home icon at any time will bring you back to the 'Latest activity' page.
The secondary (purple for us) menu contains:
(Community) 'Home', Questions, Posts, Polls, Members and About us
Questions and Posts work much the same, showing recent entries. You can filter the displayed items by clicking the drop down arrow to the right of 'Browse all' and selecting the appropriate category.
Creating a Post or a Question is much the same, only you get to include a picture with a Post but not a Question. Use a Post when you want to share something with the site and don't particularly want a response [though it is nice to know your work has been appreciated :)].
Many of us are asking questions in a reply to a Post, Question or Poll. While the administrators and volunteers will try to answer questions asked here, you are much more likely to get an answer if you 'Ask a question' by clicking on that button on the Questions page.
The Polls page is again much the same as Questions and Posts with the difference that you just see the latest poll when you enter Polls. You need to click on 'Browse all' to see all the polls.
'Members', shows you who has just joined and enables you to search for a specific member. If you type in a few characters from a member's name, you should see all members that match that string of characters, including the person you are after. You can then click on their name and you'll get the same web page I covered above. If you don't see the person you are looking for, type a few more characters to reduce the number of matches as no indication is provided that more un-displayed names are matching the few characters you've typed in.
I hope you've found the above helpful. If there are areas of the site which you'd like me to cover, let me know in a reply.
Neil
I'm new to the site, just saying hello :)
