Fair dinkum, those Aussie webby blokes are clever! They often take a perfectly respectable website with a loyal following and ‘improve’ it beyond all recognition.
First they decide to give the website an ability to only function at optimum level via one browser. You know, one with only a small percentage of users across the country.
Then they remove some of the original functions they gave the website. Teeny weeny unimportant things like how to contact website administration.
Follow that up by reducing the number of posts on the home page to around a third of what was there before, removing the editor’s recommended read, ditching msm links, taking away the post rating function and sending the blog roll to a separate page - when it’s painfully obvious that most netizens don’t bother to turn the digital page or look for hidden features. Even a big mainstream media site like the ABC (Australia) has over half its readers not moving off the first page they light on, according to Alexa.
So if only about 11% of your home audience gets a really decent view of the new and improved website on their home or work PC monitor and around 80% of your total audience only stay for one page view anyway – just how long will a website’s followers stay loyal and not flitter off to a more attractive digital flower like wayward cyber-butterflies?
Even sturdy old bogong moths like me can feel an immediate urge to take flight once I catch sight of a 'rebuilt' boast.
2 comments:
Well one can always give them the benefit of the doubt, and it was a 'crisis' that needed expeditious an solution which didn't allow for such problems to be fixed, yet (hmm, where have i heard that before).
The 'it works great on chrome' did seem rather an odd comment to make though.
The SNR is getting pretty low for that matter, and it might be just time to move on anyway.
Yes, it was an emergency move, and time spent maintaining a failing technology is better invested in the new site - it is merely a labour of love in the business of the rest of my professional, creative, and family life!
The contact form is working (forgot to make it public) again and the old Blog Roll is back. I'm waiting on the voting module to mature a little more as there are known issues. I will have it back as soon as I can.
I've abandoned the auto taxonomy as the method I was using accumulated 10,000s of items which further slowed things down and caused serious issues from time to time. Ultimately I'd like to open the sorting to the readers once I can get the flagging buttons on the frontpage (they should, but they don't.)
When choosing a theme, I settled on HTML5 and CSS3 which are rapidly becoming the standard, and certainly will be in a few more years. Therefore you need a compatible browser. Chrome is the most standards consistent. Current versions of Firefox, Safari, IE and Opera are also fine - except FF has some known bugs with rendering table columns (normally OK but sometimes breaks). The site design is mobile compatible, but I need to explore this feature in more detail once I have other development issues sorted out.
So please be patient, and I appreciate your feedback!
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