I’m kind of in the middle of another one of my random holidays where I feel continually oppressed by not having got anything sufficiently significant done. I really really need to learn how to take time off from all this web stuff. Anyway, I’ve been thinking for a while of getting rid of the ‘recent entries’ box on the homepage and replacing it with a way of directly navigating into the rest of the site. Today I thought I’d throw up this particular rough solution and see what people thought. I haven’t always categorised my posts, and I’m still working out how to do it well, so there are lots of gaps and posts that haven’t been captured and categorised yet. But it’s a start… Any thoughts? My first one is that it gives undue and slightly troubling access to a few semi-decent posts that maybe it shouldn’t…
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7 replies on “A minor change to the design…”
I like the change, though I’m a bit confused at the wording. Do you choose the best posts, or does every post assigned a category appear when one navigates to that category’s page?
In any case, the change pointed me towards your post regarding “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy”, which was just as scathing today as it was when I first read it two years ago.
I guess ‘best posts’ refers to the more substantial ones, and not your linkdumps? It’s always a bit hard to find my way back to them as soon as they’re off the fronpage. But that’s another thing. I like this quite a lot. And you want people to read your posts even they’re older than one week, right?
Seems fine – the only thing I would say is that you also should have the category navigation on each category page so we can select another category straightaway instead of going back to the homepage.
Think that works better – it hints more at the depth/scale of what’s behind the front page, for starters. It also shows what you’re interested in better – with the old scheme, a new reader coming to the site might either get a) five delicious posts there or b) a string of technical ones or c) a string of non-technical ones. Depending on his/her perspective, any one of those might be a bad thing. By showing the topic covered, you’re offering a much more balanced entry point to the new reader. I think it’s an improvement.
I like this a lot, echoing tom (not Coates)’s thoughts. What happens when you add more categories? Does it push everything else down the page? Or do these cover everything?
Hmmm.
Plus and minuses.
PLUS – New or infrequent visitors get an easy way to access your older posts.
MINUS – I visit regularly and have been for years, I liked the “Recent posts” as I could quickly see if you’d added posts recently (funny that). You COULD do both if you make them a bit smaller maybe??
Key question: WHO is this change aimed at? Ohhh and yes, who decides they are the “best” posts? 😉
I read through RSS so it doesn’t make much difference to me.