Change is good. All things must change or die. (Except sharks. They haven’t needed to change for a looong time because, sharks.) So let’s talk changes today.
First, the blog. Doing the wacky titles based on whatever this week’s story update happens to be is cute, but if I want this to be a combination of “Story updates!” plus “News you can use!” plus maybe even “Personal stuff!” I shouldn’t adhere to that pattern. So, dropping that.
Second, the City of Angles website. It’s revamped slightly! A reader commented how he preferred a prominent, up-front notice of what’s new, rather than the heavy emphasis on the full archive of stories. So, I shifted that box to the left, and added some new newsy type information to it. I’ll be tinkering with this more as time goes on, no doubt.
Third, we’ve got new City of Angles artwork! It’s official art for Amanda Walker, and also some fanart by my sister for Grandma Scarlett. So awesome. There’s art for Ellie coming next week!
Fourthly, I’m not sure what to do with my tumblr, and I’d love your feedback on that. I’m new to tumblr, and I want to make sure what I’m doing is re-tumblable, if that’s a word, or at least useful for you guys. It could be a good way to virally spread my stories. Is doing a small excerpt followed by some links the right way to go? Should I just mirror the blogposts? What’s what from what? I am not good at computer. Halp.
Finally, oh by the way City of Angles //015: What Goes Around is now up. Took some time, so thanks for your patience. If you’d like to leave feedback on the story, you can do so at the bottom of the story itself; it’s got comments built right in, just like my blog.
Okay! I think that’s about everything. Oh — when you get some spare time this week, tune into Desert Bus for Hope. It’s a telethon where some sketch comedy guys are playing the world’s most boring videogame for as long as people donate to Child’s Play. Nice video summary here. Speaking as a child who was in and out of hospitals for years and years, this charity can really save a kid’s life (and sanity). Trust me on that. Thank you.
I am only seeing a 404 error when I try to view “Scarlett Sewing.” Don’t tell me Echo got that too!
Ack! For some reason all your posts lately have been getting caught in my spam filter. Just saw this tonight. I’ve fixed the image and I’ll re-link to it in tomorrow’s blog post to make sure folks don’t miss it. Thanks!
“Scarlett Sewing” is giving me a 404 error. Which, this being the City of Angles, is making me kind of nervous….
Hm. Okay, I do like this better, as it gives you info on the most recent updates “above the fold,” as it were, but it’s still bothering me a little. You’re still sort of bucking the common standards for web page design, which would be fine if there was a reason for that, but in this case there doesn’t. What do I mean by “common standards”? Well, let’s compare a few semi-random sites:
http://www.amazon.com/
http://slashdot.org/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page
http://news.google.com/
http://www.talesofmu.com/story/
All of these sites–and like 95%+ of the WWW besides–follow the same high-level, three-panel format. There’s the top pane, with the big splashy title page and high-level navigation options, which you share. Then there’s the left-hand pane, that deliberately takes up only a small amount of horizontal space; I guess you can call it a shortcut pane, because it usually has an abbreviated site map with hierarchical navigation options, maybe a search fundtion if that’s not in the title pane, etc. Then you have the body pane, which takes up the majority of the screen real estate; this pane is where most people’s eyes are first drawn when you navigate to a news site or entertainment site, because this is where the most recent information is put.
At the moment, your site is missing that left shortcut pane, and is crowding your body pane to where the navigation pane would be expected to be in order to put your archive map right on the front page. It’s breaking the average Web user’s expectations of where to find what information, and for, as far as I can tell, no good reason.
So instead of having the menu across the top, have it go down the left? I think I could do that. I wouldn’t want to carry that through to the story pages — they need to be 100% devoted to the text of the story — but for the main page, I could rework it.
Thanks for the suggestions, I’ll see what I can do.
It’s usually a good idea for usability to keep navigation as consistent as possible, though… don’t make folks reorient themselves unless there’s a really good reason to, eh?
In principle, I agree with the idea of keeping story pages somewhat “clean”; this is especially important for readers on mobile devices where the screen size is limited. At the same time, the desktop version really should follow the common design practices that the rest of the Web does; while on the surface this seems to make the story pages busier and more crowded, in practice this actually increases readability as desktop users don’t need to reorient themselves from the way every other website is set up.
I think what I’m saying is that you should consider making a mobile and a desktop version of your website. The mobile version would have the single-pane structure for the stories that you currently have, and the desktop version would have the more complicated structure that 2013 web users are more frequently exposed to. You’ll notice that every single one of the sites linked above has a separate mobile site with automatic redirect for mobile browsers. There’s a reason for this: pretty much all modern desktop computers, even most tablets these days, have 1920 pixels or more of horizontal resolution, which actually can make it a chore to scan all the way from one side of the screen to the other when reading, and that blank left column can help narrow how far a reader has to scan while reading. At the same time, most phones are really cramped for space (even my Note 2, frankly, despite everyone else telling me it’s freakishly large), and need every milimeter they can spare. Two different use cases, two different site designs.
We’ve got the main site theme degrading gracefully to a responsive mobile, thankfully. (And Stefan, if you’ll let me do anything to help you with format for older stories, let me know.)
And yeah, I’ve emphasized to him that fullwidth in the modern era is disastrous for readability. That’s why I narrowed the CoA template.
All that said, I am still puzzled as to why you are so convinced that there is a single “common design practice” of the “more complicated structure.” Clearly there are lots of counterexamples. Why add a more complicated structure just for the sake of adding another column if there’s no need for it? I’m just so confused…
… oh wait, is this still about the CoA homepage? I’ll agree with you there, then. Could be better.
Yeah, just talking about the CoA homepage, ’cause it’s the one I have bookmarked in my “Check weekly” folder. :) I really should bookmark the blogpage instead, since it’s closer to what I’m looking for: newest info first, with easy links back to archives and other stuff if I ever get the jones to dive into archives. Anyway, you’re absolutely right that not everyone uses that generic three-panel format, and many places that don’t need it will omit the left panel entirely; the main reason I’m harping on it is that the CoA homepage *looks* like it is following the three-panel format, but then confuses the reader by switching what infomration usually goes in each place. Most sites I go to I usually default to ignoring the left panel unless I’m looking to head deeper into the site; here I have to mentally check myself and look there first. It’s just one of those little oddities that makes me twitch a little, though I agree it’s probably not as important as left-justifying the text, and the other fixes you outlined below.
I wouldn’t assume every site needs a left column by default just because those sites use it. News sites and sales sides like Amazon are a completely different genre, too… and their designs are holdovers from previous decades, too. (century even!)
After all, more and more sites these days don’t include the site-map-style left nav. For example, so many of the content-based sites I’ve seen lately, blogs etc., have the content panel as the first thing you see. I expect that trend will continue in the mobile era, too.
Some author-related examples to check out:
http://www.maryrobinettekowal.com/fiction-collectio/online-fiction/
https://www.goodreads.com/
http://kriswrites.com/category/free-fiction-mondays/
http://webfictionguide.com/
http://www.worldofamandahocking.com/watersong/wake/ — she’s made a few million bucks so far…
Not that three column is inherently bad, but personally I don’t see much point in adding another column unless you have a specific need for it.
Plus since (so far) Stefan has been pretty specific about having minimal or no navigation on the story pages, the only way that’ll work is if it’s all accessible through top nav.
Oh whoops. Stefan just pointed out to me that you’re talking about the CoA site, while I’m talking about the overall main site. Lots of similar concepts apply though.
On the CoA site, personally I’d drop the full width approach, stop centering the news section (bad readability for centered multi-line text… hard for the eye to track.) The full width blog insert below is hard for me to read too, in part because of the background and part because it’s full width.
Oh and — I like the new Amanda Walker art a lot! Allison has such great style, I tellya. :D
Yeah, the link/title obfuscation you had been doing is cute for your old time readers, but confusing for sure for any newcomers. Heck, it confused me repeatedly back when you started blogging.
I should make you a huge removable variety of colored grunge backgrounds for tumblr. Add an excerpt or quote as teaser. Post. (I can make them too if you want. Want some proof of concept examples? Send me some one-sentence excerpts.)
For tumblr the key is I need to know what would be best. Do I post text as an image? Can I just post the text? What do people who frequently use tumblr want, what would help them reblog the content, etc.
“text images” are like… half of tumblr, eh? Huh. I dunno. Maybe some interesting combo approach like have an illustration that starts a chapter with a background, overlaid with start of the story (or the section?) and then that fades down into the real text…
But tumblr wants isolated bite-size things right, so maybe just the first part of that.