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Public service announcement
22 Jan 2009 07:21 am
I'm starting a new project for The Atlantic, about which, more shortly. The result, however, is that most of my posts will be broken up into a main post and below the fold. I know that some of you will object, but there are design considerations that make this absolutely impossible to get around. Please bear with us.
Not even 24 hours after going on about government IT.
Nice.
Using a "more" tag is something that is normally done by many media outlets. Moving critical documents off site . . . not so much.
sure, but you're the one going on about government websites, and then saying design makes it 'impossible' to not have the fold - when it's clearly to bump page views and associated revenues.
If it's not, then the tech here is a joke.
I use google reader and there's often no indication that truncated Atlantic posts are truncated (no "read more" or whatnot). Sometimes it's obvious from the way the post is written, but not always--your turbotax post could have just been a really short observation.
Do you think you could let the relevant "them" know about this fact? It's somewhat obnoxious.
It's not to bump page views - it's to enable tracking. If you have to click a button to read the rest of a post, then it can be determined which posts people read.
True Anon Y Mous, I should have added that.
But the point remains, it's nothing to do with design. So IT is lying to Megan, or Megan is lying to us, or their systems are actually that bad (given how bad comments and search are, it's possible) then she had no business commenting on government websites.
I see the first post under this strategy lacks a tag indicating there is more below the fold (at least when read by rss). Could you add one of these? It will be confusing and annoying if I always have to guess if there is more (and new readers will just assume your posts are short).
Thanks!
Unsubscribing to your RSS feed now.
Megan,
If you put it below the fold, can you confirm or deny the rumor you had an affair with Clive Crook?
And is it true he has three testicles?
Mark--um, no.
It's got nothing to do with revenues or tracking, and indeed nothing to do with IT. It's a pure design issue, and all I can say is that all will become clear soon, hopefully early this afternoon if all goes well.
I read via RSS, usually on my phone. I've really enjoyed your blog, but not enough to expend several orders of magnitude more effort on it. If I can't get the whole post, it's not worth it. Bye Megan; it was nice knowing you!
Please don't screw up your page by overloading it with "features". I primarily view your page via a "bookmark" on the Amazon Kindle, and as I'm sure you're aware, the Kindle web browser doesn't take well to glitzy web pages.
I hope that whatever is to come is very good, because I certainly find having to look, "below the fold/jump," aggravating.
The RSS people should be fine--it's only the people viewing the page directly who will have to click.
I endorse it provided I understand it correctly.
Long articles will no longer fill up screen after screen? Good! Good! Good!
You just click more to see the full article? Good!
Only load times concern me at the user end. Urge IT to choose methods that reduce complexity.
KISS
most of my posts will be broken up into a main post and below the fold
IMO this is a terrible design decision and is a serious mistake which is, unfortunately, being used by more and more blogs.
I will echo KISS above and say that if you force your users to reload (and reload and reload...) to read what you've written, at the very least have mercy and slim the pages down so they load quickly. This drives me nuts at, as one example, Felix Salmon's blog, which takes ages to load.
Bob: you more or less got my point. Home pages tend to have decoration, color, advertisements, and choices.
And that is fine. Someone provides the service and it is their work, not mine.
But the articles themselves don't have that complexity. A few must contain colors, font changes, pictures, or graphics but most continuation pages will be text and can load very fast.
When I read a book or magazine I expect to turn pages and internal divisions called chapters. Online that seems equally reasonable.
In the longer term I intend to investigate speech recognition for web navigation.
Saying "page down" to a large TV screen seems better than using a keyboard/mouse. But my machine is rather slow by modern standards, I like it, and Windows 2000 suits me, so it will be awhile before I make a big change.
Megan reminds us that'Public Service Announcement' means that something you are accustomed to is shortly going to be more costly, and/or more frustrating, or unavailable. Did George Orwell coin the term?
I'm dubious. The practice of folding nearly every item has gotten me out of the habit of reading any Gawker Media Empire blogs, Felix Salmon, and a number of others.
What's the attraction of a design that requires the reader to navigate away from the now-harder-to-read main page?
If the RSS people are fine -- and only those who visit the page amd drive advertising revenue will be punished -- I guess I'll have to switch to RSS. Clicking through on posts is phenominally annoying and in a lot of cases makes the site no longer worth visiting. See also: the Nick Denton properties, notably wonkette and Gawker.
Now that I see the reason for this - as I suspected, so that the content can be combined with other content on a splash page of some sort - I wonder why the IT guys that are employed by the Atlantic couldn't use some sort of invisible html tag to automatically know when to stop pulling content from here and slap a "READ MORE" link on the front page, while leaving this page as it was. You gotta figure that some sizeable % of a blog's appeal is due to the design, which, I assume, you or someone spent many hours tweaking. And then you change it so (some of) the content can be aggregated somewhere else? Ok...
And Megan, more power to you with this new thing, whatever it is supposed to be, but it seems odd to me that, for all the talk about the death of newspapers and print media, so so many bloggers think the next big innovation in blogging is...to recreate a newspapers' front page on the internet. Genius! /groan
Didn't someone, at Slate.com or somesuch, write an article once about how reproducing a newspapers format on a computer was a poor idea?