I’ve finished sorting the posts into the new categories, replacing the temporarily changed formatting, and all the updates are complete.
Highlights are the re-optimized homepage and the ability to see much more review content before the “fold” (ie where you’d have to scroll down in your browser.)
So now that you’ve looked over the changelog in the last post and seen the new site for yourself, what do you think?
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I do love it but it feels almost naked without the image header, but I imagine in a week I would have forgotten about it all.
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yeah, totally. It’s really strange feeling, haha. I always scroll up more than necessary with my mouse wheel and feel like I’m walking into a low ceiling.
but I have a feeling that designs like this are going to become much more popular. It’s just better for social media hits and ipad style devices – more focus on content.
Like, I always liked that cool counter I had about how this is a database and how many books I’ve got, but the “Search the database” thing in the right sidebar shows that we’re a database just as easily while also being functional. I gotta try and conserve screen real estate when we’ve got soooo much information going on here.
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Only been around here about a week, so can’t really comment on how the changes look, but one thing I’d love to see is the “latest comments’ section expanded and maybe moved up to the boxes up top, replacing the “most tagged” sections, the value of which I’m uncertain…
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Interesting! I wasn’t sure people really found that feature useful.
I’ve got the most tagged thing on the front page because I figured people would be looking for reading orders of the most popular characters.
I could easily put the latest comments section to 4 comments, but as you can see it takes up a lot of room (right now with the large blog post it’s at 11 lines in the side bar for just two comments on the same post)
I think for now, most of the recent activity is on the same posts anyway, but if I start seeing comments appearing in different places on the same day, I’ll expand the section. Does that sound reasonable?
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I like it a lot actually, and I think Ryard makes a good point about the comments section. And as soon as I have the time to read the last few reviews, there are definitely going to be comments showing up on a bunch of different posts!
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Fair enough. I’ll expand it.
I think I’ll be leaving it in the sidebar for now though, since that’s on every page (and the front page actually only accounts for about 10% of the daily page views – which is a lot for a single page, but I want to make sure that people can see activity from anywhere.)
If I can figure out a way to keep it compact (maybe with a scroll?) I might be able to make a general purpose “latest activity” box that could include comments and forum threads.
Maybe I should install a heatmap and see if the site’s silent visitors are making use of the character tags on the front page.
I thought I had to have them there mainly because the large list in the secondary sidebar isn’t on the front page (Lists, Series/Event, Characters, and Creators.)
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