Website Refactoring: Improve Navigation, Performance, and Features

[larnsce]

Overview

This issue tracks multiple refactoring tasks to improve the openwashdata website's functionality, performance, and user experience while maintaining the current folder structure.

Tasks

Navigation & Configuration

• Clean Up Navigation Duplicates and Fix Links (1)

  • Remove duplicate email/GitHub links in navbar (appear in both left and right sections)
  • Remove empty space link (line 39: text: " ")
  • Fix "Report a Bug" link - currently points to /book/issues instead of /website/issues
  • Update "Donate data" link to point to correct repository

• Update Quarto Configuration for Better Functionality (2)

  • Enable search functionality (change search: false to search: true)
  • Add lang: en metadata
  • Add date-modified field for better tracking
  • Configure proper favicon for both light and dark modes
  • Add Open Graph metadata for social media sharing

• Fix Broken and Inconsistent Internal Links (3)

  • Audit all internal links for consistency
  • Standardize path formats throughout the site
  • Fix Support menu links to point to correct repositories
  • Ensure all navbar links are working properly

Content & Metadata

• Improve Blog Post Metadata Consistency (4)
  • Add consistent categories to existing blog posts
  • Ensure all posts have proper thumbnails
  • Add missing author information where needed
  • Standardize date formats across all posts

Performance & Features

• Enable Performance Optimizations (5)

  • Add minify: true to HTML format options
  • Enable code-fold for long code blocks
  • Configure image optimization settings
  • Review and optimize large assets

• Add Missing Website Features (6)

  • Implement custom 404 error page
  • Add RSS feed for blog posts
  • Configure sitemap generation
  • Add proper robots.txt configuration

Maintenance & Quality

• Clean Up Version Control (7)

  • Ensure .gitignore properly excludes _freeze/, _site/, .quarto/ directories
  • Remove any cached files from repository
  • Clean up temporary files

• Enhance Website Accessibility (8)

  • Add proper alt text to all images
  • Ensure all links have descriptive aria-labels
  • Improve color contrast in custom CSS
  • Add skip navigation links

• Fix Custom CSS Issues (9)

  • Fix announcement banner CSS to work consistently
  • Ensure mobile responsiveness across all pages
  • Clean up unused CSS rules
  • Improve dark mode support

Priority

These tasks should be implemented in phases:

1. Phase 1: Navigation fixes and configuration updates (Tasks 1-3)
2. Phase 2: Content and metadata improvements (Task 4)
3. Phase 3: Performance and features (Tasks 5-6)
4. Phase 4: Maintenance and quality improvements (Tasks 7-9)

Expected Outcome

• Cleaner, more intuitive navigation
• Better site performance and SEO
• Improved accessibility and user experience
• Easier maintenance and development