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

Re: Feedback on www.userland.com?

Author:Oliver Wrede
Posted:9/5/1999; 7:45:45 AM
Topic:www.userland.com
Msg #:10601 (In response to 10600)
Prev/Next:10600 / 10602

Note from author: the former message by Dave was changed while I was responding...

OK. My feedback sounded quite substantial. It wasn't meant that way.

I didn't mean a "complete restructuring" as you say. It is rather a question of tweaking names and the templates. The common look is fine - I just found that some items in the navigation could be grouped in another way - and improve the navigation in the userland.com domain (OK, maybe a little bit more - but not that much).

If Frontier is such a powerful tool as you claim ("makeing it easy..." - it must be be a snap - especially for the developers of Frontier....).

I just have a chance to look very briefly at the links you stated. Here is what comes to my mind:

About Andover:
This website offers nothing than a linklist to other websites. It may be true, that Andover is the holder/owner/whatever of all these websites -- but knowing that does not help me to get the value -- in fact each part is autonomous and I may read SlashDot daily while not caring about Andover -- which is fine. So to me the Andover page "seems" to be a portal - but it's just a information about business relations. Someone may argue that this should be "clothed" in a different look - not suggesting a portal site.

About Xoom.com:
I think their model is terrible. They offer something indifferently inbetween portal site and own services -- someone may argue, that the user does not care (so it doesn't matter which domains do offer what) - but I claim the users do care a lot! So I think Xoom.com has either a good sponsor - or a unhealthy future. As a user I don't care about domain-names and cookies. Branding is fine, if there is a concise value which is represented by that brand. XOOM wants to deliver everything that seems of some value (from webspace to cliparts) -- but this is indifferent. You need a lot lot of advertising to brand such a diverse service. Yahoo can do this - they have gone beyond a critical mass - but even so I think people will type yahoo into their browsers because they want to find items in the web (not that much reading stock quotes or channels).

About Knight-Ridder:
They seem to extract a service for special interest users out of what the companies agreed on. Each Newspaper can't compete with the big ones alone - so they throw in together - but what is the value a user gets? Suburban news from over 90 locations? What is the specific feature they can offer? News collection? Syndication? Of what? For whom? Whatever -- the Knight-Ridder is also a good example of bad site design. It is not clear, what you can get there if you look at the navigation - and even the text, which describes Knight-Ridders purpose, you don't have a clue. Some people will get over that, once they found out where to look for specific things...

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

Sorry, I don't understand this remark. I did not suggest a complete reorganization. What may take you a year of work is to write the content (and some structure-supporting pages). The thing I suggested should not mean more than one week of work. It's about cleaning up what was historically grown out of decisions which were not based on the overall concept - well there is one and there has been one all the time - but currently someone who starts at one of your domains will have difficulties to bring orientation, navigation options and purpose of the content together. That will only be reduced when people read the right pages - which they a) have to read first (by accident?) and b) find _before_ they get lost.

You said that people at www.adobe.com know what Adobe does, so they can start in a different way than you do. Fine. But I think 80% of the visitors at www.adobe.com will start at the top-Level page - wether they are first time users or not. I think 80% of Userlands visitors will not start at the www.userland.com page. So the question "What is Userland about?" will not be answered. They may even not ask this question, because they are interrupted by asking "What is Outliner.com about?", "What is Frontier about?", "What is my.userland.com about?" a.s.o. -- There is no model suggested by the design, which supports "Where do I have to go if I know nothing about those guys/products/services?".

I always have to explain some words before I send people to a Userland.com site, like "Don't get irritated - they are working on the structure! Look directly at blablabla.userland.com if you want to know about blablabla!". I noticed that helped people. But if the current status is the final status - I think I will have to point to userland.com as an example of what can happen if you have a powerful tool, many ideas but a weak structural concept.

Don't get me wrong! I think you have a huge amount of content to manage and I think you show how Frontier helps (you are a small team!) -- but at the end the final effects count - not the circumstances. No one knows what amount of work went into the content!

I'd love to have a customer with such a broad overview about the content and the intentions like you have. Usually we have to create structure before all the content and purpose flow in. - Therefore reorganization of websites is a normal task to perform and should be possible with limited effort (your pages are HTMLish - no much graphic artwork to redo). Frontier-like tools provide that - so what actually is your problem?

Oliver

There are responses to this message:

This page was archived on 6/13/2001; 4:52:25 PM.

© Copyright 1998-2001 UserLand Software, Inc.