Hard To Find Topics Here On TruckingTruth?

Hey all - I'm always looking to improve this website and I recently received an email from someone who asked a couple of really basic questions that she couldn't find the answer to on our website. I was not happy about that. The answers should have been easy to find. My bad.

So my question is...are there topics related to getting your career started in trucking that you've wondered about but couldn't find the answers to here on TruckingTruth? You can list specific questions or topics or whatever you like. Anything you've ever had trouble finding here or would like to see more information about is fair game.

Thanks!!!

I think most questions I've had have been answered but I think a frequently asked questions page would be good. I think most are covered through searching the forum, blogs, and reading all of the site as well as your book. It may be beneficial to have a lot of the basic stuff in a central location for quicker reference. Something like basic pay you could have the figures, then a link to a more detailed article showing the differences in pay from training to being more experienced and the different types of jobs like tqnkers, flatbeds, etc. I'm sure there are a lot of questions that are asked a lot that could be answered in a FAQ like that. Then once the user has an answer they can ask more detailed questions based on knowing the basics.

It may be beneficial to have a lot of the basic stuff in a central location for quicker reference.

See, I was thinking that when we put together the Trucker's Career Guide. I wanted something that basically took you beginning to end - from the time you start considering a career in trucking until you're out on the road running solo. It takes you to areas all over the site and covers about everything you can imagine. The problem is it's huge!

There's a ton of information to cover. There are some frequently asked questions like:

Am I too old to get into trucking?

Will a past felony or DUI affect my chances?

Can I get a local job straight out of school?

...questions like that. I could put together a page with some FAQ's. I've also thought about putting up a glossary.

But the big thing I've been thinking about is putting up a "tags" page that works like hash tags on twitter - a tag would link to every type of content on the site related to that topic like:

Getting your CDL

Stories From The Road

Free Truck Driving Schools

Passing the CDL exam

Choosing a truck driving school

...and of course a topic page for each of the major companies. I would even have a page for each state which would list truck driving schools, truck driving jobs, the CDL manual for that state, etc.

I've already started that kind of thing here in the forum by tagging different topics. You can see the the entire list of forum tags here.

It covers every topic in depth , but again that doesn't make basic questions any easier to find the answer to a lot of times.

I guess a FAQ page and glossary would help somewhat, eh?

There's so much info it will be tough to condense it all to a smalll area. I think the tags is probably the best way to condense similar subjects.

Brett this might help you some. Enable a search on the forums to look for key phrases like "New to trucking" or "Wrecks" or any of a millions other words that are descriptive. Thousands of forums, if not millions, use the search function and it searches the entire site for those key words and brings up a listing of ALL the postings that have the words in them.

I just used our search function on the site and it does exactly what i said above....

I know the problem people are having with the search function....its not your programming. That seems to be fine. Its the people doing the search. When they do a search they use just a few words and come up with a few post or maybe a few hundred posts with the words they searched for but instead of refining their search even more they give up without looking further cause they do not want to go through the few hundred post that their search brought up so they post a question that has been answered a few hundred times in past post hoping to get an answer without digging through the rest of the forums.

I just did a simple one word search concerning a topic we have talked about many times here. That word was "Trainer". That one word brought up 10 pages worth of post. Now had I added more than one word to my search to more refine the search I am sure the amount of results would have been less do to being more specific with the items I was looking for.

So no Brett your site is not hard to navigate. People just need to learn to do a correct search for the items they want and once they refine their search a few times and narrow down the results then they can go read about what they want. Its not a hard concept to grasp and has nothing to do with being computer literate. Simply has everything to do with the way people are using a selected function or in this case not using a selected function on the site correctly.

Just spent a few minutes doing a bunch of different searches using the built in Google search and did not have a problem finding what I wanted as long as I put in enough words to narrow down the results.

But if you are using 2 to 3 words in a search string and expect to get a solid "Here I AM" answer well that will not happen.

Not sure how you can make it any easier to use the search function here on the site unless you have suddenly became a mind reader Brett but unless you are willing to dedicate thousands of hours grouping and sorting EVERY topic on the forums then putting music and magic arrows pointing to the topic each person wants then I say leave it "AS IS" and we will put up with answering for the 50th time the age old question of "Which came first? The company or the bad tempered failed student that wants to blame the company".

I am with guy on this .... I understand it is up to you but I am just saying I also agree with guy - leave it as is... I know I done my fair share of asking questions before reading previous posts and then feel dumb when I could of just looked. But oh well live n learn .... searches seem to be easy on here.

Yeah, the search function works really nice but I'm wondering if there are topics that I should be covering better or are too difficult to find.

For instance, someone sent me an email the other day wondering if they were too old to get into trucking. I know it's mentioned like 1000 times across the site but they said they couldn't find anything on it so I thought "Geez, how many other things that should be easy to find are people struggling with?"

Everyone has different ways of looking for information so I'm hoping that tagging our content will give people one more way or looking for things.

It's definitely a huge challenge to make everything on the site easy to find when there's thousands of pages of information and I'm always trying to find ways to improve the navigation or make things easier to find in other ways.

Really Brett I understand what you are saying but when I did a Search for "Too old for trucking" THIS popped up as the first result on the first page and it is the exact answer the person was looking for. Could not have had a better response in that post.

The question I have is when people do searches are they wanting an exact answer as a returned search result or is "Is 52 too old to start a trucking career" to vague of a title search return?

Now I understand when people are researching this industry it can be a daunting challenge and people don't know where to start. They don't know what questions they should be asking. That is totally understandable.

The only way you could make the information here easier to find would be to make a "master page" and put a link to every title or subject on the forums on one page but that would be thousands of links in one spot and would look "cheaply done" at best and then the people looking at the page would be right back where they were to start with.....actually having to look up the info through thousands of links either through reading each post or doing a search for the info they really wanted.

The only reasonable solution that I might see as a viable fix for this is a "tree style" link page. You have a really generic group of links then as they click through the links they become more defined and towards the end of the multi-page info tree the link would point to the individual post within the forums. Sort of like a "Phone Tree" thing you have to go through when calling into almost ANY company in America.

That would be a lot of work and then still have people come and ask their question anyway cause they did not want to look through thousands of link for the specific question they wanted answered.

So I think we would be right where we are now. Truthfully I do not think its a bad thing to have to answer the same questions over and over for two reasons.....

1)...Like the High Road Training program repetition helps people learn and maintain the knowledge

2)...It keeps the info fresh on the forums and may help people think up different questions to ask also leading even more info that can be learned.

I think this is a great question...and I agree with Guyjax, that sometimes people don't know the questions they should be asking...but, one thing we have to admit is that there are a few... ahem..."older" persons who aren't really all that computer savvy..I like his idea of the "tree style" link page..