Quick Start Guide

Just show me an animation or video!

To see a handful of example moves that can be animated or viewed and printed as a gallery of illustrations on each jive count, just hold your mouse over the word "Moves" on the top menu.  A pull-down menu will appear.  Click on "Animated only" or "videoed only".

For animations, you will see a control panel showing 1 of 9 records (or many more if you a gold member).  Under this is a textual description of the move.  You can increment and decrement through the record of moves or select a random move by clicking buttons on the control panel.  By clicking the "animation" tab, you will view the first frame of an animation with the textual description to one side. By clicking "play" under the picture, the dancers will move through their positions on each count.  Clicking the "gallery" tab will show all the frames along with textual descriptions underneath.  A "help" tab provides much more advice on other functions.

When reading the textual descriptions,  CW is clockwise, ACW anticlockwise, RHS right hand side, LHS, left hand side.  Click here for a full listing.

To return to the home page, just click "return to home page" in red at the top right.

For videos you may first have to select a format.  The wizard should select the best for you.

The Navigation Menu Bar

At the top of all pages is a navigation menu bar.  When you place your mouse cursor on one of these topics, a pull down list will appear.  Simply move the cursor down the list to the topic of your choice (each one is highlighted in red) and click.

The navigation menu bar does not scroll off the screen as with some sites.

The navigator menu bar will change to a reduced selection when in the database mode, move-maker and the Q&A page.  In these cases a "return to home page" link is by the title on the right hand side.

"Return" buttons are not normally places on each page.  It is assumed that you know how to hit the "back" button on your browser.

Each of the full menu bar is briefly discussed following.

Home

This takes you back to the home page and is faster than using "refresh".

Moves

The key feature of this jive site is the move database.  There is one database for all moves, singles and doubles (one man two ladies), textual and animated etc.  Once you are in the database, the "filter" can be changed to select your desired choice, however there are some simple ways to pre-select commonly desired choices.  Under "moves" on the navigation menu bar:

• "Beginner" shows just 19 basic beginner moves.
• "Core Intermediate" shows 30 more moves that commonly reoccur in intermediate classes.
• "Jive Move map" shows a diagram connecting standard opening moves to a 100 "features" that are common in many intermediate moves. Hover to get more information and click to get an example move or two.
•  "Animated only" pre-selects just those moves that have animations, which is only 8 or so if you are not a gold member but more than 400 if you are. You can select just the beginner moves or a core set of 30 intermediate ones to ensure you have a healthy move diet (!).
• "Videoed only" pre-selects just those moves that have videos.
• "All" does (nearly) as it suggests: displays the first from a list of all the moves, ie more than 600.  Note however that this excludes moves that have not been "reviewed".  You will need to manually alter the filter to include these. 

Other more advanced possibilities are listed under these.

Advice

Currently this includes tips for beginners who are finding the whole learning episode quite daunting and advice for improvers who are humble enough to know that they could pick up some new ideas and correct perhaps some faults. Additionally there are some exercises.  These are not designed to necessarily correct your dancing as modern jive includes many styles, but help you move out of some fixed style, try other ways of dancing and choose what suites you.  Finally there is the Q&A Forum to ask the jive community about any issues you may have.

Other

This includes a list of music titles (sorry no MP3s!) that I think are suitable for dancing modern jive to, other resources for learning modern jive, regulator things etc.  There is a page for anything else that is interesting.  I always welcome hosting a page with any helpful ideas and will give due credit.  If you have something you would like me to host, just let me know.

Links

I only link to those who link to me.  That's fair isn't it?  However, most of the organizations who have helpful information about dance moves and advice are linked to.  Rather than just presenting a list, a short description of the features they offer is given.  You can filter the list down if you wish say to only show those that have move information or workshops.  There is also a separate page of "cool links".  Only the best get on this page as there are so few allowed.

Print

Obvious isn't it? Well maybe not!  Many have found that using the browsers print button prints just the left margin strip (unless you click once in the main pane first).  This button avoids this mistake by ensuring the correct pane is selected.

Help

This gives you full details on many more features of this site.

Gold

This area lets you know what you get for how much and where the money goes along with the Manual Login for gold members.  This is normally not needed as the registration occurs automatically by clicking on a link in the received registration email.

Contact

A contacts page simply lets you know how to send a message or email me.  I always reply to emails and it means of lot to me for someone to spend the time just to tell me if they are enjoying the site, quite what they use it for, or suggestions for improvements or additional features.