Comments on: TechCrunch is like Marmite and blog design is impossible

By: Jon

Jon — Sat, 30 Aug 2008 09:43:06 +0000

@ Charles – thanks for the link to Smashing Mag, very useful article

@ Matt Wardman – re. “digging up old stuff”, I’m leaning towards a “Most Popular Posts” section on the front page, and a “Related Articles” list at the bottom of each post

Yoast.com has a nice idea – a “Featured Post” block that seems to randomly show older posts. He also has a good article on how he redesigned his site.

Thanks for the useful discussion!

Cheers, Jon

By: Matt Wardman

Matt Wardman — Sat, 30 Aug 2008 01:49:03 +0000

>let me dig up old stuff in a simple manner.

I think this key – but dependent on your posting rate, article “disposability”, and audience profile.

My approach is to have an excerpts only front page on the mattwardman.com domain root, and a more tradition blog design on mattwardman.com/blog.

The tabbed approach on my front page means that people can quickly scan up to 100- 200 titles quickly, which helps justify – I try and segregate content into “quick turnover” (short/news) and “slow turnover” (analytical/comment) articles, and to keep the latter linked for at least a week.

I think the biggest problem with Techcrunch (and potentially Blogstorm) is the difficulty of finding previous content as a result of a high turnover rate – it looks as if the average article stays on the front page for about half a day.

By: Charles

Charles — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 12:29:26 +0000

Here’s a new article from Smashing Magazine all about this subject:
Magazine Themes – Usage And Considerations

By: Charles

Charles — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 12:07:48 +0000

I actually dislike excerpts on the home page, but it does solve another problem – duplicate content. You don’t have the post on the home page and on it’s own page too at the same time.

By: Jon

Jon — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 11:45:43 +0000

Thanks for the comment Patrick

It’s tricky to find the right balance when your site is trying to sell as well as inform. But I’m moving more towards the “content first, sales second” model – ie. building trust first with useful content

Cheers, Jon

By: Patrick Altoft

Patrick Altoft — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 11:23:57 +0000

For me it’s purely about making the site look like a newspaper site and making sure that the homepage has links to lots of articles.

Having to scroll way down a page is poor usability IMO.

By: Jon

Jon — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 10:54:01 +0000

Hi Patrick

Could you comment on your thinking behind putting excerpts on the home-page? I’m thinking of doing a re-organisation of my site, and putting excerpts of the latest blog posts on the homepage (rather than just a list of titles)

I’m thinking it will help with both SEO (more keywords on the homepage), and user-friendliness (more enticing info to lead people into reading the posts). Are there any potential downsides?

Cheers, Jon

By: Siddidq

Siddidq — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 19:11:18 +0000

wikipedia is NO Follow so what you going to get from it? i didn’t get

By: Charles

Charles — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 11:49:54 +0000

p.s. I really like the current design of BlogStorm because it uses the world’s most readable type – 13px Verdana.

If it’s good enough for the BBC, it’s good enough for me.

By: Charles

Charles — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 11:48:18 +0000

I like the new TC design. It’s much fresher, lots more whitespace makes it easy on the eye. It’s more 2008

I’m about to redesign my friend’s blog – which badly needs some whitespace:
http://www.videogamesblogger.com/