Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

Re: Feedback on www.userland.com?

Author:Dave Winer
Posted:9/5/1999; 6:09:51 AM
Topic:www.userland.com
Msg #:10600 (In response to 10599)
Prev/Next:10599 / 10601

We should redesign all our sites because we now have a home page that tells you where they all are?

Suggestion: Seperate hierarchical navigation, global functions, local functions, sites features and domain switches.

How? Show me some examples of sites that do this well.

Looking elsewhere for examples

What's the relationship between SlashDot and FreshMeat? Andover. (The only apparent answer on that page is that they're accumulating numbers. They say they have two million web developers reading their sites. They used to have one million. They're growing. Is there a philosophy? Some value-add for the Andover name? I have no idea who Andover is, I have a much better idea of what SlashDot and FreshMeat are.)

Another comparable site: EarthWeb. (Two levels in you find something like what we have on www.userland.com.)

Look at the sites at the top level of Xoom.Com.

Find an explanation of what Knight-Ridder is from their tie-together site.

Anyway, I don't think we have a choice. The links down the left edge are not intuitive? OK, fine, what should we do, merge outliners and xml-rpc into one site and throw in the Frontier docs and the verb docs? What would be the point? We'd never be able to launch a new site, and a visiting user would be impressed with the number of different links but would be nauseated by the complexity.

Why do all the Yahoo sites end in .yahoo.com? Part of it has to do with branding, wanting to make the Yahoo name better known. Another reason is the architecture of the web and personalization. That's the problem with Xoom's "architecture" -- that's why you have to join each site separately because they can't share cookies because they all have different domain names.

What do all those .userland.com sites have in common? That question is answered on that page. Anyway, completely restructuring our site is out of the question. We just spent the better part of a year getting it organized, getting a common look across all the sites, and behind the scenes building an editorial system so they're easy to work on with the new tools we're developing.

Even if we agreed to reorganize everything, what would we do in the interim while we're waiting for inspiration to strike us?

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