Admin Question: Redesign
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I mentioned this in yesterday's SOTW thread, but thought I'd ask in a bigger post — I'm in the beginning stages of starting to think of refreshing the design for the blog and thought I'd see if anyone has any favorite blogs or websites that they LOVE the design of (so I can see if their designer is available for hire, and otherwise get ideas). It doesn't have to be similar in style to this blog, just an intelligently designed website. Thank you guys in advance for your thoughts!
(Pictured: our original logo and color scheme, just for kicks.)
I’m a Ravelry member and there are a million clever features built into the s!te – though I don’t know how well they’d work here.
Ask A Manager recently went through a site redesign that added lots of helpful and sensible comment features – I haven’t been reading there as much lately just from being too busy so I can’t 100% speak to how it’s working out, but I would take a look!
I’d like to see you add Makeup Alley style reviews (for clothes and clothes stores instead of makeup) and message boards.
Cupcakes and Cashmere!
I love the current design, Kat. Beside’s, I showed Frank, and he said that you can get all kind’s of negative connotation’s if you redesign using a Capital “C” — I think he meant a bad word that we all do NOT like to hear (but which sexist men alway’s describe us as when we will NOT sleep with them). FOOEY on them. Do NOT give them an excuse to label our websight as one for Capital “C’s. DOUBEL FOOEY!!!!
Apartment Therapy has a great layout and the design always looks simple, fresh, and easy to navigate. I think it could be really easy to use their scheme for this site!
I really like sarah jenks’ design – sarahjenks [dot] com
I really like the design of Smitten Kitchen for two reasons: the organisation of the content and the logos and sidebar menu is minimalist but also comes across as elegant,at least to me. Actually I like everything about her site except the font size which is too small. This is not a food blog but I think you could borrow from her “Recipe Index” to catalogue some of the content here especially all those “how to” or topical articles. If that’s impossible, then a good custom search bar is what’s needed so people can find what they are looking for. Like the idea of a “Good Reads” link on here for sites you frequently link to or quote, Above the Law comes to mind etc.
Also like the big bold banner at the very top of the page on sites like “A Cup of Jo” and “The Sartorialist” with the main menu bar underneath. Commented on this on the other thread but you could leave out the pink in the site name/logo and it still would be fine.
I strongly recommend having a forum with different topics instead of the “threadjacking” that happens multiple times on every post. That would help to organize the content and have it be searchable (or at least navigable) in the future. Then your blog posts can be about the topic of the day and kept on topic. I think both temptalia.com and (the now defunct) younghouselove.com both have forums and daily blog posts. I think YHL feels more organized and the forums didn’t seem to reduce blog/daily post traffic at all.
No! I am not interested in forums… part of the fun of this site are the threadjacks… forums would limit the pool of readers offering advice, in my opinion.
Forums and/or login = I am out of here (I think)
I mean this in the kindest possible way, but I think that this site’s strong suit is the threadjacks. I’ve learned more from the random postings than the proposed topics, hands down. I would probably not really read here anymore if it went to forums b/c I’m not going to take time opening 20 different forums on a daily basis, nor am I going to click on ones that I don’t think are applicable to me (which, in the threadjacks, is often where I learn the most).
+1,000 to all of this
+ 1
I also really don’t see the need to keep the comments “on topic” for most of the posts. How many comments would there really be about a particular pair of shoes or a blazer? I think it works to have on-topic only comments on posts about financial stuff, job stuff, like Kat is currently doing. That way people can be on topic on one thread, and have a few more to go off topic.
But see the number of people on yesterday’s post that vehemently disagreed. Funny to me that people feel so strongly on each side.
I will stop reading if this s!te becomes a forum.
If she did this, there’d only ever be about 5-10 comments on each post.
But then there’s so much information shared by commenters that I would have missed in a forum setup, because it was about something I didn’t know I was interested in or had never even heard of before. There’s much information I would have missed out on if it were all separated by topic.
Though I originally showed up for the style, the conversation is definitely what keeps me. I’m not here solely for information. If we spit up all conversation by topic I don’t think there would be the sense of community that there is now.
Having said that, I *d0* appreciate the topical posts where there’s a warning to stay on topic or risk having one’s comment deleted. I think the posts themselves are on helpful topics, generally, and I appreciate the focus on blog content.
Yes, this! All of this!
I do think having a +1 /thumbs up button (maybe even a thumbs down…?) and collapsible comments would go a long way to placating the people who don’t like all the extraneous chatter.
+1
I agree completely!
I think collapsability would be good, but I’d urge against up/down votes – I think that that would negatively impact the sense of community and make things more competitive/combative (which has its place, but I don’t think that that place is here).
Agreed, 100%!
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO. I will stop reading.
You Look Fab has a nice feature where you can switch between blog-style view and webs1te view with menus, categories. I also like how the blog posts have comments in addition to the forums.
I find that when s1tes I like move from comments to forums, I participate less – I guess I really enjoy the real-time feel of comment threads living on the current post, whereas forums take active searching.
My major comment would be that the side bar always seems really cluttered. I like that GaranceDore and even Girls of a Certain Age are cleaner looking sites.
I also personally find non-serif fonts easier to read on screen (serif is easier on paper).
I’m also pro forums. I find searching past discussions to be difficult, and I like the idea of putting our collective wisdom in a more useable form. A forum would allow for us posting pictures with outfits of the day, or specific clothing items with styling questions, etc.
Thanks for asking for input!
1. On the forum point, I used to think it would be great to have them. However, I’ve realized that why I like this s*te is the varying nature of the comments and the real-time conversation – like a question about restaurants in a city, I’m happy to answer if I happen to see it in the thread, but I’m not going to actively click into a travel or food forum every day on the off chance I’m relevant. I’d worry that forums would get stale or static. I’d rather see a better search feature (i.e., not having to use the G**gle trick to search comments).
2. I like Ask a Manager’s ability to collapse comment strings.
3. IMO, the list of trigger words for m*deration needs to be posted somewhere or revised. Words like s*te trap far too many comments, and it inhibits the real time conversation.
4. Is there any way to fix the “you are commenting too fast” issue? It’s very frustrating.
I want to concur with comments nesting, a la Ask a Manager. The random nature of the comments here would make it particularly useful for your readers. And yes, thanks for asking for input.
Agree with Moonstone and Cat.
I agree with all 4 points.
I agree with everything Cat said.
I too agree with everything!
Ditto on all four points.
I agree! I prefer comments to a forum. Also the collapsable (sp?) comments would be great.
Agree. I really hope you don’t go to a message boards/forum type of setup. The vast majority of conversations that occur organically on posts aren’t ones that I would seek out or click on, but I enjoy the variety.
Another +1 on all these points!
Yes to all these!
Cosign these too!
+1 to all of these comments.
I’ll take a look at askamanager. The posting too quickly error is likely to persist unless we move to a third party commenting system like disqus, which I don’t want to do.
I like the format of the Happiness Project blog and the Dinner: A Love Story blog. Also You Look Fab!
Way to be original by just asking if there’s other blogs you can copy off of. . . god you and htis blog are so mediocre and lazy it pains me. The dutchess kate of the internet.
I think you were looking for Get Off My Internets.
Whoa. That’s really uncalled for. Kat isn’t trying to copy some other blog, she’s trying to get an idea of what formats and styles her readers prefer. Do you really think other bloggers don’t get ideas from other blogs or that the same webs!te programmer doesn’t set up similar s!tes with similar functionalities for multiple clients?
+1 for content and +10 for the correct spelling of “whoa”
Sent to moderation for using s i t e.
I like the ability to give a thumbs up on DearWendy.com , but I don’t like that you now have to login to comment now. I did like that you used to be able to login (which I think kept you from going into moderation), but it wasn’t required.
And +1 to askamanager, although she definitely had some tech issues when that redesign first went live for about a week
I also like that most people on this s!te don’t use Gravatars – I think you could probably get rid of that little box, honestly.
And please, please, please try to find a better search option. I’d love one that allowed us to see our search results in chronological order, because I often look for something where I know the approximate timeframe (1 week ago, 1 month ago, etc).
a scroll-to-top button/function. When there are hundreds of comments on a post, it would be great to get back to the top quickly. Ok, so I see there’s a “go to top” in tiny print way down at the bottom of the page. But, what would be more helpful is a floating arrow/button wherever you are in your current view–I don’t know the terminology, or how to better describe it.
I also agree that a more sophisticated search function would be great. If I search for “hotpants”, I would love the post AND the thread/response to be highlighted so that I don’t have to dig through the hundreds of comments to find what I’m looking for.
And the moderation words are crazypants.
I also agree that the randomness of the threads is what I appreciate about thiss!te. No forums.
It would also be nice to see the “popular posts” above the “find us on facebook” on the sidebar.
+1 to all of this
And I would love love love a “see new comments” function. I feel like I miss some good stuff when I can’t go back and carefully read a thread again.
Oh! Yes, a “see new comments” function would be great.
+1 – great suggestion
Another voice for no forums; definitely, what has kept me here all these years is the random conversation. I have learned so much from the threadjacks and comments that I would never have read if they had been in a forum.
I read YLF too but I almost never read Angie’s blog posts (something about the way she writes rubs the wrong way, but more importantly, the comments responding to the posts are always on topic…boring!) So, on YLF, I go straight to the forums and click on the posts that appear interesting by virtue of title, poster, or number of comments. But again, those posts are always on topic about style/fashion, which is not what I always want. I think she has off-topic forums but they are so well hidden that I have only ever found them by accident. Plus they are in forum format and, not to keep being redundant, that’s annoying.
Also – YLF as a website seems almost TOO slick. I like the low-tech, kind of simple look of this place.
I really think what makes THIS place so special is the randomness of comments and threadjacks made by such a diverse group of smart women. If you lose that, you lose me.
(Though I would like the collapsibility option!)
I like the aesthetics of Modern Mrs Darcy, although not sure I can specify exactly why.
Instead of forums, why don’t you have your editor ‘curate’ comments into summary articles? If there are threadjacks on, say, restaurants in Chicago, compile those recommendations and comments into a quick ‘restaurant recs’ article. Same for personal finance, career advice, etc. I remember you did something like that for a discussion on whether fashion was empowering, summarizing a discussion in the comments. You could post these sumnary articles in a reference section of the s!te
I think if you did it this way you’d keep the threadjacks in place but also preserve some of the useful info for easier access later. You can do this easily with qualitative data coding software.
What qualitative data coding software are you thinking of? I have never looked into this… do tell. Thanks!
There are a few qual data coding programs. I use NVivo, but the other two major ones are MaxQDA and Atlas.ti. these cost a fair bit, but there are some free ones like Dedoose. The wikipedia page for computer assisted quitative data analysis has a good summary
The idea is you load all comments into the software and code (basically, tag) them as ‘travel recs,’ ‘wedding’ etc. You can nest codes, so under the ‘wedding’ code you can have ‘finances,’ ‘dresses,’ etc. Then you look at all comments tagged with a certain code and write a summary article.
It’s also a good way to see what themes come up in comment discussions too. With nVivo at least you can make some cool charts and matrices to see what themes are coming up in comments and how often
I kind of love this idea.
I’d probably stop reading if there were forums instead of the comments/threadjacking.
But it’d be incredibly awesome if you could somehow let people list tags in their comment threads, or somehow make searching through the comments easier. I mean, for example, if people are making a comment, can we get a feature where you’re required to choose a “subject” in a drop-down menu (like “finances” or “relationships” or “babies”), and then somewhere on the site around the Search function, we can just browse through all the links to “Finances” comment threads or “Relationships” comment threads. I always see people commenting that a question has been addressed and that they should search, but searching is difficult right now on this s!te.
Also, when I subscribe to a comments thread, it’d be nice if I could subscribe only to replies to my comment, rather than new comments and replies to other threads of the same page.
Also, can we get a “automatic adjusting to window size”/mobile design? That way if we’re reading on our phones or tablets it’s easier to navigate.