Do you ‘bog’ rather than blog?
That may seem like an odd question, but it’s none-the-less highly relevant in today’s ‘instant’ world where the speed in which we require input has increased, inversely proportional to the patience required to wait.
Over the last few weeks I have taken a keen interest in where people are going when browsing this website, along with the realisation that I have too many plug-ins in use, that generate far too much javascript, which is seldom actually used.
Case in point? The immortal archives. I had both live archives (a great, but terribly javascript hungry function) and tags listed. Closer inspection of visitor navigation patterns shows that the archives are often landed upon, yet they seldom then direct those visitors to content. To make matters worse, the live archives doubled up on the tags.
It’s clear that once the live archives are presented, one has to know, down to the month, when a particular entry was made, in order to then locate it. That strikes me as entirely the wrong way around, one should be able to find an entry via discovery, not pure blind luck.. and whilst search is your friend (and mine) common terms can easily dig up numerous posts..
Thus, the live archives are gone <cue Wagner’s ‘death march’>. In it’s place, is a more search engine and, most particularly, human engine friendly option — months are presented in both a short format, for ease of navigation, along with the actual posts, the entire point of archiving, listed, one after the other. Fire up the ‘find’ function in your browser and you have a fast method of finding pretty much any post title you want, in nano-seconds — javascript not included.
Virtually the entire point of blogging is to highlight content, something that often gets drowned out in our web 2.0 world, where shiny sliders and buttons, useless functions (not to mention bells and whistles) are all too common. It has a place, do not get me wrong - but that place is to help power content, not become it.
I’ve recently noticed a number of my preferred reads have embraced an ever increasing array of gadgets and gizmos, all crippling the performance and the impressions gained. If such things put me off from actual, live, visits (I don’t just read your RSS, should you blog, I will often visit, too..) what might it do to my readers? Put them off too? Quite probably. There have been times that my comments are swallowed, because some ajax function breaks, or it takes so very long for all that bloat to load, that the page times out and I, well, I give up and leave.
So, cometh the Axeman. Gone are live archives, gone are wasteful and pointless plug-ins and gone are gadgets and gizmos (word to the wise? ditch pointless widgets, including those bundled with WP - better still, just don’t use a widget aware theme) that reduce navigational sense or content value, don’t validate, or bundle suspect javascript.
The result? .. a lean, clean design, that highlights the content that you, dear reader, are reading.. be it direct, via RSS or via a mobile or hand-held device.. and I hope the results make it a better return for your time and energies invested so that, perhaps, you’ll visit more often (and suggest others do too).
≡ This is a journal entry relating to the topics of concepts, design, updates, web2.0, wordpress.
Brendan Borlase is a Systems and Network Administrator living in Adelaide, Australia, having lived, worked and breathed Information Technology for over 12 years. Learn more.
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