Boxes And Arrows : The Design Behind the Design

Looks great! I wonder about the placement of the Adsense ads in the article page though. I am sure I am not the only reader who finds the ads breaking up the article text annoying. Placing them beneath the full text of the article (https://www.google.com/support/adsense/bin/static.py?page=…) seems like a better alternative.

I love the pull quotes on the article page. It adds a graphic element and a scanning element for user at the same time.
I use them for electronic newsletters, but I never thought of using them for a web site. Good idea. I’m jealous I didn’t think of it first. Darn!
I plan to borrow more journalism ideas for web use in the future.

I agree with Dmitry about the Google Ads. And I’m not sure how much having them midway through the article will improve clickthrough.

I would enjoy related advertising on the homepage: ads for events, conferences, software, books, websites, etc.

Those kinds of ads would go along with my goals of visiting the site to keep up with the practice.

The overall design is excellent.

While I like the fresh new design better, I’ll definitely miss this old one. Kudos to whoever came up with this “baby blue” version. It always made me smile when I visited (sniffling).

Adsense? What adsense? I’ve got the dreaded banner blindness, so I skip right over it anyway.

Gabe Zentall: http://www.zentall.com was our first designer. But all designs get messed with, and start to fall apart as new things are added and Gabe’s vision has long been corrupted. We hope the new design lasts as long as Gabe’s did!

I like it. Professional look, and pulls together some of the key content chunks better…

I think the funtionality is much better! Much added, and much improved.

...though the tag nav could be improved, it looks much to focused on big terms. I’m working on a similar tag nav, and I’ve needed to really hone it down to get it to be not distracting or presenting preferred content.

Speaking of preferred content, I really feel that the ratings system is slightly tacky, not quite as tacky as unrelated ads, but pretty darn tacky, to say the least. This is a pretty big gripe I’d think, and even devalues the portal, in my opinion. I wouldn’t be suprised if this leads to less readership.

I think the primary problem with voting / rating systems is that they tend to be driven by the ‘true believer’ type personas and not by the other personas. Voting doesn’t work with a sceptical audience, which many people are. You are better off to measure sucess by page views, I would reckon, that is if you want popularity as a motivator.

I also noted that most of the content on the site isn’t at all rated, only the last 20 or so with any kind of consistency. I would think this comes accross as people rating themselves, or even worse. I don’t think this idea really compliments the site at all really. It’s only gotten to 10-15% of the articles, and the ratings are completely askew, either 4 or 5 stars, or none at all.

Like I said, it’s not a fair representation of the readership. And, I would think, that with an audience of systems designers, you would be a bit more reluctant to add something both unreliable and unnavigable, in essence.

I think the redesign is nice, however, as I said inititally, it’s got tons of new functionality, and might better represent the amount of content that you have.

My only real concern is the popularity contest model employed as of late. It’s not a very realistic or sustainable model.

I hope that it’s either improved (i.e. made real), or removed.

Thanks
CD Evans

I’m disliking the reputation points thing for a couple of reasons: it’s bulky on the page, it’s difficult to compare while scanning, and revealing actual numbers usually results in distorted voting behaviour.

Might I suggest some kind of sparkline thing instead? Less visual impact, you can’t read the exact value, easier to compare amongst multiple instances, and (my favourite) you can see a history (are they trending upwards, do they swing up and down, have they been absent/ignored for a long time). Hmmm, the more I think of it, a sparkline inspired by stock market buy/sell graphs would be nice :-)