I’ve reworked joeblade.com over the last couple of weeks, trimming it down to just the essentials. Here are some details about why.
Though I liked the wide version of the site, in particular the large masthead images that accompanied many of the posts there, it left me with a lot of space to fill outside the articles. I attempted to fill this space with adverts, and with links to previous posts, latest comments, the usual malarky.
The problem with the ads was that a) they were ugly and irritating and b) nobody ever clicked on them. I don’t blame them for this — I don’t click ads on websites either. I use an ad-blocker, so it was a bit hypocritical for me to include them in the first place, but the logic behind it was that a massive amount of my traffic comes from search engines, and it was an attempt to make a few pence off of the people that don’t hang around, but it never really worked — I think I made a couple of pounds over several months, which wasn’t enough to justify their inclusion.
As for previous posts, related content and all that jazz, this was part of an attempt to get people exploring past content. The site’s been running on and off for years and there’s plenty in the archives, but this didn’t really work either. Regular visitors didn’t need to explore the archives as they’ve read it, and new readers generally didn’t bother either, preferring to stick to whatever was new. Fair enough.
Finally, comments. I’ve been toying with the idea of disabling commenting for quite some time now, and with this version of the site, that’s done (though I plan to restore previous comments soon). There’s never really been a big, thriving, chatty community at joeblade and what I and the guest authors write doesn’t often lend itself well to debate. It’s also partly a reaction against the internet tendency to make everything commentable, even when it doesn’t make sense to do so.
When you enable comments, it alters your mindset a bit. You start worrying when people aren’t commenting, and you start trying to tailor your content to the needs of those that do comment just to try and get a discussion going. But joeblade isn’t really about that, and many of the sites I regularly read have a similar set up — lengthy articles and no commenting. I like this. It makes sense on a technical blog to have comments, so they’re staying open here.
So: the site is leaner, meaner and slightly prettier, using Typekit and wp-typography to make the content sparkle. Though all the above suggests a design failure, I’m not seeing it as such. The underlying architecture was strong, allowing me to make all my changes in under two hours, and I’ve learnt a lot technically as well. Not only that, I’m more comfortable with my own site: I’ve accepted that I have time to write for my site, or to spend ages designing and architecting it, but I don’t have time to do both to the extent that I’d like. As I have to choose, I choose to write.
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Wrong! Put it back to the wide size, please. I don’t mind if you want to increase the font size to fill in all the gaps :)
If there’s anything that working for the guardian has taught me, it’s that if the first reaction to change is negative, it means I’ve done the right thing.
Why do you want the wide version back? For the big pictures? The content width is still the same.
Love the new masthead. Also the rest of it, but especially the masthead.
On Ubuntu 10.04 with Firefox 3.6.3, I’m getting a vertical line down the page. It seems to be caused by this CSS:
body.content div#wrapper {
background:url(“/images/chunky-divider.png”) repeat-y scroll –480px 0 #FFFFFF;
}
Otherwise, looks good.