Hey Matt, Just wanted to say this looks really great, I love what you have done with the site 🙂
new look
Hey Matt,
Just wanted to say this looks really great, I love what you have done with the site 🙂
10 thoughts on “new look”
Comments are closed.
Thanks…
Thanks. It’s actually a totally stock theme from drupal.org. Going to do some modifications (put frames around the pictures, for instance, and remove the big arrow in the background), but it seems to be a reasonable base.
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Matthew P. Barnson
I like it, too.
It’s a fresh look, and it’s good to have the avatars back! —
Christy
New Package Same Great Taste
I like what you have done with the place… heh..
Looks great.
Experiment
So I’m doing an experiment, as well. I’m including Google ads for a few months, to see what my click-through rate is. The site isn’t free to run, so if I can make a few hundred dollars a year advertising, then it pays for itself.
Additionally, I wanted to be less of an “island”, and more of an “aggregation point” for people who host their own blogs here, as well as those who run their blogs offsite and syndicate them using RSS or Atom feeds. So I changed to a three-column layout, where the right-hand column is all about different content of people that I know personally. I cleaned up a bunch of stuff I didn’t need (who really needs to syndicate from slashdot.org anyway?), and tried to make it more useful even if there are no “local” postings for a day or two.
Let me know how it works for you; my primary concern is that it makes the site “busier” than I like. I’m not sure how to fix that, while linking to other people’s blogs and making recent posts accessible to visitors…
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Matthew P. Barnson
me too
I’ve worried about the same thing on my site. I decided that left column is for on-site content, middle column is for “primary” content, and right column is for off-site content. it is a bit busy but I wanted to keep the content organized and still include much of the items I think people are interested in. you have my vote. 3 column is the way to go.
Similar to mine!
That’s funny, I came up with a very similar layout here. Left side is navigation and information, while the center is the “good stuff”, and the right-hand column is for on-site and off-site community links. I tried giving every blog its own block, but it got way too big, way too fast, even with the limited number of sites I aggregate.
So I used the Aggregator Categories function in Drupal 4.5.2 (very cool, by the way) to create a “Friends’ Blogs” block. I only wanted it to be five deep — people can always click “more” to get the full listing — but then I found out that the “Recent blog posts” and “Recent comments” blocks were 10 each, and it didn’t look right.
So I dug around the admin menus for about 20 minutes looking for where I could set how many rows are returned for those two blocks with no luck. Then I hit the source code, and sure enough, the SQL statement that retrieved them specified 0-10 as the rows to return. So I made it 0-5 instead, and now they look “right” for my low-posting site 🙂 I think it’s obnoxious that that isn’t available as a GUI-settable parameter though.
I’ve been thinking about replacing the front page with links to everybody’s blogs, too. That will probably wait until or unless I get a lot more posting traffic. The point at which it will make sense would be when we have more articles every day than the front page can handle, which, given how long it’s taken (3 years) to reach the point of something new being up every day, seems like it may take a while yet 🙂 I love the fact that we just write about what interests us, though, and that apparently there are a ton of other people who are interested in it, too.
Heck, I’m excited that I rate an entire block on your site 🙂 I dug through my logs, and here are some scary statistics…
This is somewhat coarsely grained, as I run more sites than just barnson.org on this web server. But not that many more, and this site represents roughly 88% of all traffic (by bandwidth usage) to my server.
Interesting to crunch the numbers. And people wonder why owners put ads on their sites. My limit is 40GB of transfer per month, and I’m bumping over that quite often now…
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Matthew P. Barnson
Suggestions
Matt,
In my opinion, avoiding visual overload stems from less choices and logical flow. I agree that the 3 tier approach works as the logical flow. But making the site accessible for users and visitors means cutting down on the amount of choices.
-Remove some of the columned features that aren’t necessary. Sepcifically, do we really need the “Recent Blog Posts” in the right column? If a visitor wants to see a recent post they can click to “Home”. The posts all have dates of entry, so people can see what’s been posted recently. Eliminating the “recent blog posts” means you can also get rid of the “recent posts” in the personal menu in the upper left-hand corner.
-Do we really need 5 listings in the “Recent Comments”?
-Do we really need to have the All-time “Top Nodes” listed on the front page?
-The focus is the primary content, or postings, in the middle column. Is there a way to globally lower the font size on the left or right columns? I like what you’ve done with the color differentation.
-Can we kill that arrow watermark?
Alright, just some thoughts. Appreciate all the work!
Changes…
That makes sense, given the structure of the site. I’d been thinking about restructuring that, but what you say makes sense. Everyone’s used to the “recent news on the front page” thing.
The “recent posts” function in the user menu is actually something totally different, and brings up a list of the most-recently-commented-upon posts on the site. I know two of us use that pretty exclusively for keeping up. But it does mean that “Recent comments” can go…
(clicks a few times) (unchecks a box)
OK, done.
Naw, we probably don’t need that at all, given that “recent posts” is available on the left-hand navigation menu, even if a user isn’t logged in.
You know, I have been thinking about that. It’s available under the “toplist” link at the top so…. (clickety click) it’s gone too.
Yeah, gotta hack the CSS. That is more than a clickety-click 🙂
Done. Christy hated it, too. Right up there with the “picture of Matt when he’s constipated” watermark that I used to have…
So those changes (clickety click) also mean I can put “Who’s Online” on the right-hand side, and slide the Google ad up a bit so that my click rate goes up.
At 50 cents a day, it’s not going to make me rich, but it will help defray the costs of running the web server!
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Matthew P. Barnson
Recent blog entries..
Is the first place I click when I come on.
It lets me see how the threads of conversations are going..
I’d make it more prominent, not less.
Paul’s Blog
Just an FYI: Now I have a “Friends blogs” space. At least for Murphy Maphia (Paul’s blog), you can log in over there as “my_username@barnson.org”, using the same password you do here. We’re linked that way; you’ll note his login is “paul@murphymaphia.com” here. Same thing.
That’s a nifty thing about Drupal: you can use someone else as an authentication source, so that you don’t have to keep profiles all over and can just have one password among affiliated sites. Unfortunately, Yahoo, MSN, and the other authentication sources I used to use here at barnson.org are broken right now, and I’m not positive I’m going to bring them back…
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Matthew P. Barnson