Last week, I spent time updating our web site. The goal was to make the site more usable by reducing the clutter and changing some of the navigation. The most noticeable change is on our home page. We removed the latest blog and forum posts, and generally reduced the content contained on the home page. The result is a much cleaner, crisper home page (in my opinion).
As someone who has been a part of this web site since its inception, I’m very interested in your opinions about the overall usability of the site. What I’m also very interested in is your opinion about the content of the site.
· Do you find value in our articles?
· Do you find value in our blogs?
· Do you find value in our downloads section?
· Do you find our forums have value?
I’m asking these questions in my blog post as a round-about way of discovering how many people are actually reading this blog. We can tell how many time articles are viewed, but the blog module that we use does not track the number of views. The only gauge that I have is the number of comments that get posted in response to each blog. To date, these have been few.
I’ve made an effort to blog every other week about software development, posting article-length blog entries. Perhaps that is a problem: Should they be shorter? Research shows that most blogs should be short, contain bullet lists and be very focused.
In the upcoming weeks prior to PUG, I’ll continue posting, but my goal will be to keep my entries shorter and more in line with current research in terms of length and format. And fair warning: I’ll be talking with you at PUG about this site and the areas that you find most and least valuable. After all, we should continue doing the things that are valued, and stop wasting our time doing the things that no one values, right?