ITauthor

I’ve been doing a few little tweaks to my web site recently. Nothing major, just trying to make it easier for people to find stuff that might be interesting, either tucked away in one of my posts from the past six years, or on someone else’s blog. So, today I added a page listing a truncated summary from the latest post on the blogs I like to read:

http://www.itauthor.com/articles/recently-posted-by-other-bloggers/

I realise this kind of entices people to leave my site, but so what? It’s kind of dumb to expect people to hang around your web site for very long. For example, I regularly go to the BBC web site. I never stay there very long. I don’t browse through lots of pages. I’ll look at two or three pages and then I’m off somewhere else. But because it’s well designed and has good content I go back again.

But I’ve been thinking about my web site and how I’ve pretty much just blindly gone along with the standard WordPress format, with a panel down one side with links to category and month archives. I sometimes click a month link – typically back a month or two but rarely further. But I never click a category link and I suspect nobody else does either. I don’t use tagging, but if I did I think it would be the same thing. Why would anyone browse through a tag or category archive?

The navigation that I think is useful is the collection of potentially similar posts at the end of each post. Sometimes this throws up something that I’d forgotten I wrote about and I’ll click to have a look. I think other people reading my posts might also click to have a look at an older “similar” post if it sounds interesting.

So I think I’m going to take the category links out of the side bar. I’ll probably leave the calendar links in there for now, but I’m tempted to get rid of that side bar altogether and go for a really minimalist look. On the other hand I was also thinking that the site looks quite austere. So I’m also a little tempted to try and make it look less utilitarian.

But I’d be interested to know if anyone finds tag/category lists useful on a blog. Aside from never using them on my own blog, I can’t remember ever having used them when I’m reading other people’s blogs either.