Shiny New Site
Well, shiny refined site. There are a number of things that have been bugging me about the embeddedstream site for a while, but I haven’t really had an opportunity to address them. Well, now I have.
Some of the issues I had were…
- I didn’t feel like the main content pages were particularly legible or easy to read
- There was a lot of guff and noise around that wasn’t necessary
- The homepage wasn’t very useful
- There are lots of posts (about 160) that are not very discoverable
Based on these gripes, I’ve reworked the site. The changes include…
- Homepage now consists of recent posts with full content
- Style changes to make text more readable
- Simplified the design and removed any unnecessary noise (both in content and design)
- Added tagging support, and tagged all posts to make content discoverable
The main thing really is tagging, which now part of the core Wordpress product (from version 2.3 I think). I was always a little skeptical based on fads and fashion, but if you have a large amount of content it’s a really powerful way to find things you’re looking for.
Have a look around and let me know how well the new shoes fit. Also if anyone knows anything about tagging support within Windows Live Writer, or the MetaWeblog API then let me know. At the moment I’m writing content in Live Writer, then updating tags in Wordpress.
Hi Oli, I like the new site – much better going straight to the blog instead of the original homepage and as an added bonus it renders much better on my phone!
Comment by James, December 10, 2007 @ 2:38 pm
The new site looks great, though I still think you should have a photo on the about page. Go on, you know you want to.
Comment by Mike, December 10, 2007 @ 5:14 pm
Thanks! Hey, do you have any idea if mobile browsers pay any attention to the handheld css media type? If so then I could do a special version for you when using your phone – otherwise would have to do resolution sniffing with javascript, then swap to a different sheet.
Cameras always get my nose wrong. I’ll consider it, but might take me a while to find a decent pic.
Comment by Oli, December 10, 2007 @ 7:35 pm
Why not put up a photo from when you had loads of hair, then the nose would not be an issue because people’s eyes would be distracted
Comment by James, December 11, 2007 @ 12:25 pm
I could just go neck down and skirt around the issue.
Comment by Oli, December 11, 2007 @ 7:13 pm