Blog Organisation, Navigation and Information Architecture
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Although nobody much reads my blog and I'm fine with that, there are some rather stone-age aspects of it which bother me. Namely:
- Each entry has a fragment id on the index for that month but doesn't have a page to itself.
- Dates are given as timestamps, not proper dates.
- Yearly indices are just a list of months in that year.
- Difficult to navigate between years.
- Difficult to navigate between months older than the previous 12.
- No list of every entry, although there is a search box.
- Each entry has its own page. Was less laborious than I feared but still a lot of work.
- Converting timestamps to dates was pretty easy.
- Added an All Years list to the sidebar.
- Monthly indices now have a list across the top with all months in that year.
- Making the yearly indices useful took a lot of thinking and iteration but I'm really happy with how they turned out.
I sometimes see people only expose part of very long blog messages in their monthly indices. Some blogs only post brief description for each entry. Are either of those good ideas? To me, skim-reading and scrolling past entries you don't want is faster than assessing whether the visible portion is compelling enough to click the link and skim through the rest of that entry.
There were also an embarrassing number of broken links in the entries. Those are hopefully all fixed for 2003 and 2004. Thoughts, bugs, suggestions and reviews welcome!
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My CV type thing and my Life of Ben (Blog). Nigel Peck's Accessify Forum Requirements.
Last edited by Ben Millard on 29 Jun 2008 05:32 pm; edited 1 time in total
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| Cerbera wrote: |
| I sometimes see people only expose part of very long blog messages in their monthly indices. Some blogs only post brief description for each entry. Are either of those good ideas? To me, skim-reading and scrolling past entries you don't want is faster than assessing whether the visible portion is compelling enough to click the link and skim through the rest of that entry. |
For me personally, I much prefer being able to skim/scan the subject matter.
It may make for a larger document - depending, obviously, on the number and size of topics - but I believe there will be others who find this method more effective.
I particularly dislike brief descriptions because while my brain is trying to absorb the information, my finger is twitching to click the link! I'm usually disappointed to find that the full topic is not to my liking/requirement/interest. I suppose if the author was careful in their short description it might be different...but will they use the correct trigger words to stimulate your curiosity/interest?
I particularly find the practice of using an actual piece of the text as a link, followed by '...' very annoying. I know in other forms of media this is accepted as meaning 'more to come', or 'more to follow' or such. But is this accepted in terms of web documents?
Interested to see what others think.
Cheers!
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Blogging at: AWTS (Accessible Web and Training Solutions)
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Cheers, that's useful feedback! I'll stick with putting whole messages in monthly indices.
I've gone live with the changes on the entire blog. Feedback welcome!
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My CV type thing and my Life of Ben (Blog). Nigel Peck's Accessify Forum Requirements.
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