In lieu of an article today, we’re updating our theme. There are a bunch of minor improvements, and two major ones. New visitors and regular members of the community should both benefit from the changes.
New User Benefits
We’ve updated the navigation fairly dramatically (and some additional tweaks will quietly sneak in over the coming days).
- Easy to find items at the top of every page, including:
- Explanations about subscribing to Tyner Blain.
- Our “About” pages.
- A handy link to the Foundation Series articles where you can find introductory posts that support most of the articles here.
- An “all articles” link – this one is a monster, showing every article under every category. Hundreds of links, but fun for topical browsing.
- A “top twenty” link, showing the twenty articles that have been viewed the most (since Feb 17th). This list is dynamically calculated, so check back every once and a while to see if there’s a new “winner.”
Community Member Benefits
We’ve made it easier to join in on the conversation!
When you comment on an article, you have the option of being notified whenever someone else comments on that article. You don’t need to worry about forgetting to come back and check to see if anyone has responded – now we’ll tell you.
Other Minor Improvements
We’ve made a handful of other improvements
- New fonts and sizes to make it easier to read, especially on higher resolution monitors or with older eyeballs.
- Changed the layout to make it easier to focus on the articles.
- Updated the sidebar to get the most important links in the easiest to find places.
- Optimized some queries and page structure to improve rendering times.
- Slightly improved the layout when printing an article (more improvements to come in the future).
Give Us Your Feedback
Let us know what you like, what you hope we’ll change next, and please let us know if there was something you liked better “before.”
Also – please submit any “bugs” you see – we can’t test every browser on every platform, and we may have missed something.
Thanks all for your continued reading and participation in the great discussions. It is exciting and humbling to be a part of this!
The new and improved printing is now available. Just use your browser to print an article. No need to cut-n-paste or click an extra link. You can use print-preview to see what it looks like without wasting paper.
Thanks again all, and please let me know if you see any issues.
Keep up the great work.
Another tweak – I’ve removed two-thirds of the ad placements on the site. The goal of the ads has always been to cover operation costs for the blog, and with our growing popularity, we don’t need as many ads.
Hopefully this will make the user experience better for everyone!
Scott
Excellent work. The new site is definitely easier to navigate. … and congratulations on your growth. Your site is, IMHO, the product managers #1 resource
Thanks Deepak! And thanks for being such a loyal reader and contributor. I hope to keep making the site even more useful for product managers and business analysts.
Any suggestions on how to do that?
Another update.
Thanks for the offline suggestion, Ric!
Now on the index and category pages (at least for articles after April 1st), you now get to see the image, links, and more text – where before it was just a plain text summary of the first paragraph.
There’s also a “Read the rest of the article…” link to let you know that there is more to read. And for really short articles (not that there are many of them) the entire article will show up in the index / category page.
Thanks again for the continuing feedback on usability, everyone!
Scott
Looking better by the minute – I knew having the pictures would be good! Just one more thought – most blog rendering happens from the left column and goes right (YMMV) – so it may be an idea (if possible) to put the post column on the left, and the sidebar on the right, so that your content renders before the bling (after all, it’s the CONTENT that people are here for, so don’t slow it down any more than necessary).
Hey Ric – thanks for the suggestion. These pages actually render right to left :) I wanted the articles on the right, but I wanted them to load “before the bling”
The browsers will (or should) render the html top down in terms of the source. And my css is set up so that the article is first in the source, then the comments, then the stuff on the side. And since the images are on another site, the page should load without them then fill them in as it can.
Thanks again!
Discovered issues:
1) nav bar on the top of the screen has a rendering issue in IE6.
2) “all articles” page uses chronological order, but order is messed up for posts prior to 2006-01-16 (when the blog was moved from wordpress.com to our own hosting). Note – id’s were not created sequentially during the migration – may also be an issue for some articles that were written in advance of their publishing date.
To fix:
1) add IE6-specific CSS hack to style consistently
2) modify page generation to explicitly use post dates rather than post IDs
When: tbd