This Dang Website

By Shamus Posted Wednesday Jul 4, 2012

Filed under: Notices 225 comments

I’ve been thinking about what I need from this website, what it needs to do, and how I’ve been running it. As I’ve sketched things out, I’ve come to realize why I haven’t been able to make a design that really works. The problem is that this thing is incredibly complicated. It didn’t start out that way. This blog began life as a simple little thing with a minuscule audience, no content, and a very narrow focus. As it expanded, the site design has failed to keep up.

For years I’ve been underestimating the problem because, hey, it’s a WordPress blog, right? How hard can it be? As it turns out, wrangling seven years of mixed-media content into a convenient, readable, and intuitive interface that works on desktops and mobiles, is useful to everyone (newcomers, regulars, and archive surfers) doesn’t overwhelm the reader with too much data, and doesn’t look like complete ass is difficult bordering on the impossible.

Reader Strangeite pointed out that a good website needs these skills, in this order: Good interface design, good graphic design, and good coding. My skillset is the reverse of that, with most of my skill points dumped into “coding”.

In the past, I’ve solicited feedback on this, but I was frustrated because each person told me how to make the site more useful for them, which would almost always result in making it less useful for someone else. This was my fault, because I hadn’t properly defined the problem. So let me try to draw a picture of all the stuff the site needs to do.

For the curious, I’ve outlined everything the site needs to do or show.

Site functionality.

Obviously the most important things are the basic features that readers will expect to see on a blog or other frequently-updated website.

  1. Posts. The post area needs to be 600 pixels wide. 600 is the magic number. Less, and too much space is wasted on a desktop LCD. More, and the site is a nightmare for smaller screens and portable devices. Yes it must be 600 and I’m never changing it so don’t ask. And no, making it “variable” isn’t a solution, it’s a system for making it look awful everywhere. You have no idea. Your particular jumbo-resolution dual-monitor setup is not the center of my universe. I’m looking at you, Josh.
  2. We need the ads, somewhere near the top, if we want to pay the bills.
  3. Search should always be available.
  4. People need to be able to browse by category or date.
  5. I like having the links to other websites.
  6. The RSS links need to be available and easy to find.

Important content

Over the last eight or so years, I’ve made a truly astounding amount of content. This is incredibly valuable. Letting a new reader know about my past work can make the difference between “rabid fan” and “person who maybe heard of Shamus Young and might have read something he wrote a couple of years ago”. The way my website is now, it’s a bit like a Disneyland where you can’t see anything beyond the visitor’s center and the front gate.

I need a way to let visitors know about all of the following stuff in an engaging way, and without devouring a bunch of screen space and getting in the way of people just here to read the latest post.

  1. My books
  2. Spoiler Warning
  3. Webcomics
    1. DM of the Rings
    2. Perhaps also Chainmail Bikini
    3. Perhaps also Stolen Pixels.
  4. The four big programming series: Terrain, Pixel City, Frontier, and Octant.
  5. My various videos, particularly the Reset Button series.
  6. Perhaps a link to my “best” posts – stuff that was a big hit, but which wasn’t otherwise part of a series.

Other Information

On top of all of the previous stuff, we also need some additional information for people who want to go beyond the site itself or connect in some other way.

  1. Contact info – People sometimes need to email me.
  2. Ask me a question – It’s nice for people to be able to start a discussion without thread-jacking and without resorting to email. If you really want me to write a post on the new D&D edition, you might not want to email, and there might not been an appropriate place to ask about it on the front page.
  3. Donate button needs to be where people will see it, but not so prominent that it gets in the way or feels unseemly. Specifically, people should NOT see the donate within the first ten seconds of their visit. Asking for donations before you’ve given people something is a big turn-off. On the other hand, its sort of pointless if it’s buried.
  4. Minecraft Server – It’s a sister community. Or a spinoff community. I don’t know how I’d classify it, really. But it works best when visitors to the server come from the site, which means we need a way for them to learn about it on the site.
  5. Twitter feed – I actually use Twitter a lot for thoughts that don’t justify full blog posts. A lot of people will want to read that stuff, so they need to know it exists.

This is a lot of information. It all needs to be on the page, somewhere, in some situations. On the other hand, this site serves a lot of different visitors:

  • Post-specific newcomers – If I write an article that is widely linked, new people will show up for that one specific post. These people likely have no idea who I am or why they should care.
  • Newcomers to the site – These people know who I am, but they’re new to the blog. Maybe they read my content on The Escapist, or my book, saw or my YouTube videos, etc. These people are here looking for more content, or information about me.
  • RSS Viewers – I don’t use an RSS reader myself, so I often forget about these folks. They read the posts in their reader. They don’t comment, they don’t see the various links in the sidebar or the menu on top, they don’t see any of the cosmetic features of the site, and they don’t see the ads. These people are like ninjas, viewing the content without leaving any trace.
  • General readers, regular visitors, and archive surfers – The people who read the site and perhaps even leave comments. They need the various search tools and a robust comment system, but they know about what I’ve done and how to find it.

We could quibble about some of these or divide that last group into sub-groups, but I think I’ve made my point. There are different visitors with greatly different needs.

Over the past few months it’s been a regular part of our morning routine: My wife gets up, makes tea, turns on her computer, and is aghast at the latest nonsensical interface change to Facebook. The site is regularly updated. The coders are writing new code and functionality. But this results in changes, not improvements. Things keep moving around as the site tries to be all things to all people at all times. It’s madness. It’s exactly the sort of thing I want to avoid on my own site, which is why it’s so rare that I change things.

Having said all that, I think I am ready to make changes if I can find a good design. If you’re curious as to why the site has always seemed a little wonky, now you know. If you’re interested in helping, then the primary thing I need is UI help. I don’t need a new blogging platform, or new graphics, or a new theme. Those are superficial changes. What I really need is a way to wrangle all of this information and make it fit without overwhelming the user with extraneous clutter. This is something that can probably be accomplished with a notepad and a pencil by the right person.

Now would be an excellent time to bring up the parts of the site that don’t work for you.

 


From The Archives:
 

225 thoughts on “This Dang Website

  1. perry says:

    i think your site is already doing all of the things that you mentioned, why change?
    just add a twitter updates thingy in the sidebar.

    1. Vlad says:

      Huh? There is already a Twitter updates thingy on the side bar of the front page.

      1. Woodthorn says:

        Our work here is done. Anyone up for a coffee?

        1. Moriarty says:

          on that note, there isn’t a link to shamus twitter account anywhere on the site.

          To see the whole account, you need to click on a specific tweet, then klick on your name above the tweet and THEN click on “see more from shamus young”.

          1. Michael says:

            Yeah, this has been annoying me recently as well.

            1. Adam says:

              Thirded. This is infuriatingly many clicks to see a twit.

              1. chiefnewo says:

                n + 1thed, where n is a large number.

                1. Dwip says:

                  x2. This has bugged me forever.

                  1. Didero says:

                    Me too.

                    I’m sorry if this sounds like bragging or something, but it annoyed me enough to write a simple GreaseMonkey script for Firefox (no idea if it works in Chrome).
                    If you want to use it, first, install the GreaseMonkey Addon if you don’t have it already.
                    Then download the script here.

                    Again, sorry if it sounds like tooting my own horn, but I thought I’d provide a solution to your annoyance.

      2. Mechakisc says:

        There’s a front page?

        I come here from my RSS reader, and almost never visit the front page.

        1. Sleepyfoo says:

          I have visited the front page a handful of times, and immediately gone to the search bar to find what I wanted, ignoring everything else there.

          The rest of the times, I too come through the RSS feed.

          Peace : )

          1. MrWhales says:

            I have never used the search here. Well maybe once, but it was back when I might as well typed “Shamus Young wrote a thing” into Google. I usually head to the categories and then search in there. Usually finding a series from forever ago that entertains me before I realize I forgot to find the thing.

            I’m not quite complaining about it. I might just be the one-off and everyone else can get through the categories just fine. I dunno, that is how it works for me.

    2. MintSkittle says:

      I think what perry means is that the twitter feed doesn’t appear when you’re viewing the full post, and not on the front page. That’s how it displays(or doesn’t) for me, anyway. So I think it should be that we want to be able to see the twitter posts from all twentysided pages, and not just the front page.

      1. perry says:

        exactly my point. i didn’t even know the front page had the twitter thing. i never visit the front page.

  2. HiEv says:

    One thing I’m not quite clear on; other than things being a bit harder to find/show than you’d like, what things exactly do you think are broken? What isn’t this site doing that you think it should be doing. Because it seems like, other than that, most of your needs are already met.

    I mean, I have a couple of ideas, such as being able to place articles in multiple categories so that people could, for example, have next and previous links for an article for both it’s broad category (such as the “Let’s Play” category) and a narrower thread within that category (such as Josh’s Shogun 2 articles). But I’d like to hear a bit more about exactly what you think is wrong first.

    1. Shamus says:

      The big problem is that there’s really no way for people to know about the “other content” unless they dig for it. The categories are only useful once you’ve read them a bit and have a sense of what each one means.

      1. Peter H. Coffin says:

        That’s a tough one, and since that’s the need, that’s what needs to be figured out. There’s a common psychological trick people play on themselves, where OTHER things get changed so as to not feel stuck on the hard problem. But the outside world sees that merely as change for change’s sake and snickers that time and/or money’s being spent on it. for no actual benefit. Maybe the category buttons need actual labels on them above or below, and the hover text should be a one-sentence description instead?

      2. Thrawn says:

        The easiest (from a design/programming standpoint) for helping people find “other content” would be for you to plug your it more often in updates. I’m not saying that you go out of your way or mess up your writing style, but when you write an article keep in the back of your mind that if something reminds you of a joke used in a webcomic or a paragraph in another article, try to fit the link in there. I mean, you already do that, but maybe do it a bit more. You could also try a “suggested post” box at the bottom of each post, but that’d be rather nightmarish to either do heuristically or by hand (I would think).

        Secondly, I’d suggest making the “categories” droptab on the sidebar much, much more prevalent. It’s kind of hidden where it is, you can’t even see it without scrolling down a bit on most monitors.

        Third, rather than multiple categories, you might consider more specific content tags or individual series tags. I’m sure some fans would be happy to slog through all of your old posts and put tags in for them, though you would still want to have final moderating powers.

      3. Zak McKracken says:

        I think a look at boingboing will give some inspiration (although hunting for a specific post I remember form last year is still hard on that site).

        What I do like is the three links to recent prominent posts at the top of the page.
        Also: If you’ve scrolled all the way down the page, it will load more posts and show them at the bottom without going to a new page.

        The many many category icons at the top of your page look like too many to me. Maybe you could reduce those, or put a single larger link (or pop-out menu) there that contains all the categories, but with names and larger pictures? The menu would also make for a viable UI for sub-categories, since they could be in sub-entries.

        1. Strangeite says:

          I never read BoingBoing but I respect Cory Doctrow, so I went and checked out the site. You are right, that is a pretty well designed front page that showcases a lot of material in a unobtrusive manner.

          To bad they utilize the infernal Disqus for comments, the only way it could be worse is if they utilized Kinja.

        2. MrWhales says:

          I never knew those were actual buttons to the categories until I accidentaly clicked one

      4. Kacky Snorgle says:

        Are you sure that that’s actually a bad thing?

        When I’m a new visitor to a site, I’m usually just there to read the article that I dropped in for. I don’t *want* the site’s complete history and content waved in my face, thank you very much.

        If I find that I often end up reading and enjoying articles on that particular site, then I might take a look around and see what all else the site has got. So there needs to be a menu/archive/something that I can find without too much trouble, but it should be kept where I *do* have to go looking for it.

        In other words, Shamus, please remember that you should be making your content available–you shouldn’t be *promoting* your content. There’s a difference, and sites that are on the wrong side of the divide get annoying quickly (especially when I’m new to them and haven’t yet learned what I should ignore). If the content is any good (which yours is), then readers *will* eventually dig for it; until they do, flogging it isn’t likely to attract them.

        1. MatthewH says:

          I agree with this. Sometimes I go to a site and at the bottom they have a “hey, we’re getting a lot of links – while you’re here, check out A B and C.” I almost never do unless the article is really good or I find myself going to that site a lot.

          On a related to this thread, but not this post point: I would like to be able to cruise the archives chronologically rather than by category. Sometimes I search out an old rant and I wonder “what else was going on the third week of July in 2009…” but “next” takes me to the next rant, which may be a month or two later.

      5. Ateius says:

        Why not take a page from Rock, Paper, Shotgun‘s layout? When it comes to exposing their content, they have a header and a sidebar.

        First, across the top, is a selection of their latest “big” articles – game reviews, previews etc. This tends to contain three links, in the form of thumbnails (usually cropped from an image featured in the article) with a title.

        Second, on the right-hand side is a “Read our finest words” sidebar. This contains a few links to older articles, and seems to have a rotating selection of features and interviews. At the bottom is a link for a full archives sorted by tags.

        Both of these bars are noticeable enough to see but not, in my opinion, annoyingly in-your-face as though they’re desperate to push their content.

        1. MrWhales says:

          I have not been on that site in a while. Very well planned out. Simple but effective. The only thing I don’t like is when I just turned off Adblock there, the sidebar dropped to the bottom of the page for an ad. I think it might be just because they have some weird theme-ad currently, but I want their sidebar, not their ads.

  3. TMTVL says:

    For “Important Content,” I’d like to add G: Experienced Points. But as Perry said, you’re already doing most, if not all of those things (I don’t use RSS Readers myself, so I wouldn’t know anything about that, but visiting the site on my PS Vita seems to work out), so if you are going to make changes, I’d suggest keeping them small.

    There is, of course, also the possibility you’re just angling for compliments, so…

    Twenty Sided is really well designed, Shamus. Good job!

  4. Mephane says:

    Now it might just be my personal habits (count myself among the General readers, regular visitors, and archive surfers crowd – I do all of that), but I found the site very efficiently useable so far, and don’t see the need for change from that perspective.

    This does not mean that there is no need for change from any of the other points of view, of course. One thing in regard to newcomers I might suggest is a short list of popular posts and series (i.e. starting posts thereof) in the sidebar. A lot of blogs do that, and I have found my attention grabbed by interesting topic titles in such lists more often than not.

    Another thing I would suggest is tightening both archive and category view. There is far too much space wasted in between entries, and even the entries themselves are too large. Two lines of text for each should be enough, like this:

    This Dang Website (Jul 4, 2012)
    (Category: Random) (Shamus) (2 comments)

    Instead, the title alone takes up more space than needed for the entire entry, and the space between entries is as large as the actual stuff. I think someone browsing by date or category would rather have a compact and concise overview with as little scrolling and pageing as necessary.

    P.S.: I totally agree on the fixed content width. About 800px in total is ideal for blogs, with about 200 reserved for margins and sidebar. It’s not just about how much fits on a screen, but the length of a line of text has an enormous influence on readability.
    (That is why I do not run my browser maximized on a wide screen, as some websites insist on taking all the horizontal space they can get for text, and even though my screen is larger, my browser window is still ~1000x1000px large.)

  5. littefinger says:

    I find that even with widescreens I still modify the window for a browser to fit in the screen-equivalent of an F4 page in terms of width (aka +-210 mm). It’s the width at which I can read fastest. Thanks for optimising (more or less) for that layout.

    edit: was supposed to be a reply to mephane. oops.

    1. Methermeneus says:

      Specifically, the best size for long-form reading is ~65 characters (which is also the standard used for novels, regardless of which of the four or five standard book sizes is used). This is why an 8 1/2 x 11″ or A4 page covered in text looks so intimidating: that’s based around 72 characters per line at 12 point to begin with, but 11 and 10 point fonts are becoming more popular for some reason (when I was in college, the standard was Times New Roman or Courier New 10 pt.), which makes it even more wall of text-y. This site’s 600px works fairly well: It’s at the high end, ~72CPL, for me, but that seems smaller on a wide screen, and I imagine it fits quite nicely on most mobile platforms, in addition to probably having a different CPL on a smaller screen. (I really only ever read Twenty Sided on my desktop with its 20″ widescreen.)

      Another way to accomplish a similar effect (just for people’s information, as Shamus has already said he doesn’t want to use relative measurements) is to use “em” as the measurement. An em is a typographical measurement that will always be relative to the font in use at the time: the width or height (whichever is greater) of the largest letter theoretically possible in the font at its current size. For most fonts, this is the measurement from the bottom of the base of the tail (the lowest part of a p, q, or g) to the top of the riser (the highest part of a d, b, or t). Since no character is actually an em in width (except the em dash: —), you actually want a much lower number than 65 or 72 for that width, however, unless you’re using a monotype font. I find that 25em averages just over 64CPL.

      However, as Shamus has said, using relative sizes opens a whole new can of worms, and god forbid you should ever mix multiple kinds of measurements (px + em + % = Why is my Facebook Like button sitting on top of my text while the Twitter button is halfway off the screen to the right?)

  6. Z-Ri says:

    (Hmm… that is a can-num-drum)

    The solution that springs immediately to my mind is to just make a “new readers” page and emphasize the link over on the right there. On that page just have an organized and attractive looking laundry list describing all the stuff you’ve done and then linking back to said stuff.

    All that will change for regular readers (I think as it is now the site works well for regulars) is an extra link, and in exchange interested new readers have a place where they can see all you’ve done and start learning about it. It might be a pain to update and certainly doesn’t solve all the problems but I think it would solve a few without a lot of overhead.

    1. hewhosaysfish says:

      Shamus doesn’t even need a new “New Readers” page: the main page (www.shamusyoung.com) already has a list of things that he has done/is doing. I always go straight to http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale but the main page is the logical first starting place for new people.

      I would say with (with all my authority as a Random Dude On The Internet) that Shamus needs to do three things:

      1) Update the main page to include all the important content – Reset Button, programming projects, Witch Watch, the Minecraft Server.

      2) Add the ads, the twitter feed and the donate button.

      3) As you said, Z-Ri, make it possible (and obvious) to navigate from the blog back to that main page so that “Post-specific” newcomers can get there easily.

      3+1) Implement Mephane’s suggestion of a “Popular Posts” sidebar to entice newcomers into browsing more.

      1. Daemian Lucifer says:

        +1 on this.All the things for a newcomer(book,projects,popular articles,comics,spoler warning)can go on the main page with nice navigation.Then the only thing needing fixing are the archives.But that is another can of worms.

      2. I disagree, in the sense that new readers often get here through a specific post (for example, I found it through one of the DM of the Rings Comics). From within Twenty Sided, there is no way to get to that home page, sort of editing the URL. Nor does anything imply that there is something to see there. If that is to be the landing page for new users, Twenty Sided needs to direct people there.

        1. Moridin says:

          I’ve been reading the blog for a long time, and I don’t think I’ve ever even seen the main page.

          1. Adam Fuller says:

            I didn’t even know there was one until now!

        2. TheHidden says:

          You mean except for that DM of the Rings Icon right on the very top of the page right above the title. That is a direct link to that place.

          And that is one of the problems, most people won’t look ABOVE the title as it is – well – the title, and frankly the most uninteresting piece of information on the page.

          As most people are used to the blog-format pages these days, they basically scan downwards till they hit the article title, and continue from there.

          Pull those icons below the title, make the images brighter (the darker they are, the more they are perceived as background). And add a subheader along the lines of “My other stuff”.

          Consider the top of the page as your third tier information place. the right sidebar as your second tier part and the content part as your first tier information part.

          People will look in the sidebar before they check a top menu on a blog-style page. So links on the top need to stand out, and thus must be clearly discernable as links and not as simple design elements. (That is another reason why many people won’t notice the icons. They look like random images from this page, and as such as part of the title design, and not as links to further content).

          Further down in the comments i already saw tags mentioned. Those, plus a tag-cloud help navigation and discovery a ton. Especially for losely related content bits which are in different categories.

          This article, as of yet, is in the “Random” category. If it had tags like programming, html, blog, design someone interested could just click programming and get a list of those other neat programming articles you’ve done. The user would simply follow his own stream of interest along your tags and probably discover a ton of content more.

          But yes, it IS a huge amount of work to add those, especially since you already have a $*17load of content.

          But that is nothing you can’t alleviate with some creative SQL by adding default tags to every article in a category.

          So yeah. That’s my 2 cents.

          1. You mis-understood me. I wasn’t saying I couldn’t get back to the DM of the Rings. I couldn’t get to Shamus’s homepage: http://www.shamusyoung.com

            1. TheHidden says:

              Ah. Sorry for that. And you are right. That link is nowhere to be found. That is … odd.

              Then again. That main page is actually not much more informative than the icon bar above the title.

              I still think that my other points are valid.

            2. swenson says:

              I actually always forget he has a homepage… I generally get here from my RSS feed, typing “sh” into my address bar and having the site immediately pop up because I come here so often, or typing “twenty sided” into the address bar and have Firefox bring me directly here. So for regular readers, the homepage is pretty unused… but for newcomers, that might be a good place to start making things more accessible to them.

    2. Mari says:

      But there’s more to being a “new reader” at a blog than just a laundry list of “stuff Blogger X has done.” Particularly with personal blogs like Shamus’s, basically reading the blog posts is forming a mental “history” with the blogger. It’s great to know Shamus did Chainmail Bikini and to read and enjoy it, but without some context of HOW C.B. came into existence and how/why it went out, it’s much less interesting. Regular readers here get excited when Shamus does a new “A Thing About Stuff” and they each stand alone, but seeing the progression of Things About Stuff gives context about Shamus himself. And when Shamus does an anti-DRM post that begins, “You all know how I feel about DRM…” with a link or two to previous rants about DRM that’s great, but it’s hard to really understand his stance without the full context of HOW his view of DRM has developed, which means reading ALL his blog posts about DRM, not just one or two.

      Thus, I would emphasize that a readable and navigable archive would be vital to new readers as well as a high quality tag or category system. And I say this with the recent experience of having become a “new reader” at another HIGHLY complex, long-running blog that has a cohesive community of dedicated readers/commentors. It was excruciating to read through 8 years of backstory and history to get the current in-jokes because the only way to “archive surf” was to select each month from a drop-down list, scroll through five posts that are each as long as a post and comments on Shamus’s blog, hit the “previous” button, lather, rinse, and repeat back to the beginning of the month then read forward. It was horrible. I started having to wear a wrist brace with scroll wheel finger support just from archive-surfing one blog. And, like Shamus, this blogger also has content across multiple sites and content providers which meant not only reading everything at the blog itself, but having to read all the “guest posts” and such at all the OTHER places she blogs to stay “current” with the jokes.

      While Shamus has no control over how, for example, The Escapist organizes and runs their site, it will help new readers to Shamus’s blog to give them easy and uniform access to his content on their site from his blog.

  7. ACman says:

    Tags!

    It might be time consuming going through all your posts and adding them but it’d make your site a lot more navigable if you had a range of tags.

    Your categories are fine but there is a lot of stuff in the category “Movies” which might tangentially be related to movies but is really about graphics compression, or a link to a “let’s play”, or it’s a discussion of about copyright infringement, or it weirdly might actually discuss a Hollywood Movie.

    Tags like D&D, RPG, FPS, MMORPG, Computer Game, Table-Top, Bioware, could be used to break up all the posts about gaming. etc etc.

    While people can of course search for any of these things though the search function, a page of the tags that you think are worth keeping a note of would give everybody a good idea of what the bulk of this site is about.

    1. Alan says:

      Maybe you should delete all the navigation and put all the content on one huge post so that everyone will be able to find what they are looking for.

      No?

      Seriously though, I agree that more tags would be useful.

      Rather than trying to build the idea from scratch, it might be worth looking around other blogs with different kinds of content to see how they lay things out.

    2. The Schwarz says:

      +1. No, make that +1 million.
      As you’ve mentioned, this site has *tons* of content. Searching is OK up to a point, but tags are the future.

      1. daniel says:

        Another vote for increased use of tags — not just for new users, but also for people who have been around. I enjoy rereading some of the review/nitpick posts and would love to have a way to find them easier.

        Is a tag search possible?

    3. Peter H. Coffin says:

      2 cents: I never think of clicking on tags to find things. The only time I’ve ever clicked on them is to try to sort out what particularly cryptic tag names meant.

    4. Zak McKracken says:

      I’m not a big user of Tags either, plus if the focus of the blog drifts over time you might find yourself using different tags for the same things over the years, which doesn’t help, and you need to consistently tag everything as you go along, including the old posts… *shudder*
      I’ve once tried to start tagging my photo collection, but it ended quickly.

      Buuuut!
      I see two other ways to make tags, and make them be useful, that can be solved with programming:
      1.: Tag the stuff you write, but ton’d sweat it, and have a way for users to add tags themselves, i.e. crowdsource the tagging. That way you’d end up with tags that mean something to the audience. Or large amounts of “stupidest post ever” tags … it’s an experiment.
      2.: However the tagging is done: When showing a post, also show links to “similar” posts, based on prominence of that post and tags. Since most posts are longer than what is in the right side bar, there should be sufficient space below that for a list of posts. This is not a very deterministic way of showing the reader what he/she might be looking for, but it … oh wait. I’m stuck way too long on your site anyway and should be doing something else right now… forget that. Make your site black with black letters, or just don’t write anything interesting. It’s better.

    5. Jack V says:

      I like the spirit, but I don’t think it’s necessary to re-tag old content (simply because no-one ever gets round to it, even if it would be helpful).

      My advice would be:

      1. Have prominently placed links to “if you’re new to this blog, here’s stuff you might like”. Either just by name, or with an explicit splash page, like “Here’s the link to recent entries. If you’re new you may want to see [description of webcomic] [description of tech project #1] […] […] etc”

      2. Decide what categrories new stuff should be posted into, and possibly have links to sort by the most common categories

      3. Only then retag old stuff

  8. bubba0077 says:

    I’m generally one of those RSS readers, but I was a regular visitor before I shifted to the RSS thing and I still pop in to make comments occasionally. With regards to the donate button, I think a good location that satisfies all your conditions would be at the bottom of the post, next to the social media buttons, something like this:
    http://www.bubbaland.net/twentysided.jpg

    Archives might be best handled by just an “Archives” link across the top menu, with a mouse-over drop-down for “Categories”, “By Date”, and “Search”. This would get them out of the sidebar in the middle of the page where they are difficult to locate. The Minecraft Server probably doesn’t need the prominent position it now hold across the top menu; first-timers (and even most regulars) don’t need it. That small group that does can afford to dig through a more complex path to get there.

    My advise would be to keep the menu across the top, but change most of the current categories and add a couple of mouse-over sub-menus:

    http://www.bubbaland.net/twentysided_menus.html
    (Crude text table showing layout. If anyone with better web skills than me wants to do a mock-up with actually mouse-over dropdowns, that’d be great.)

    1. disagree that the menu is the place for Archives – in general, you want to reserve the menu for highly focused links to content. Archives are diffuse; no one ever uses them (unless you’re curious what somebody wrote on your birthday, or 9-11, or something. rare). The only things in teh menu should be the Important Content shamus referred to in his post. One Page per Important Content type would do the trick.

      1. bubba0077 says:

        I disagree on this one. I think the menu is the ideal place to put a link to the archive. It is one of the most common operations a reader would want to perform. Note there is more to going through the archive than just looking up a post by date. The design of many sites back me up on this.

      2. Mephane says:

        This is just not true. For example, I always browse the archives of blogs that I have recently discovered, sometimes to the point of reading the very first posts ever made there.

    2. bubba0077 says:

      Here’s a second one that replaces “Best Posts” with “Miscellaneous” based on Aziz’s comment below. I also like the miscellaneous because it gives a place to put the D&D Campaign write-up (which is still awesome) and the Minecraft Server link.

      http://www.bubbaland.net/twentysided_menus2.html

    3. Tharwen says:

      I don’t have anything useful to say. I just want to complain at you for using a jpeg to store a UI mockup.

      1. bubba0077 says:

        My expertise is in model coding not web stuff. The web knowledge I do have is dated: I know how to choose between jpg and gif depending on content, and to use png/tiff for high-res non-web stuff (assuming it isn’t vector). That’s the extent of my knowledge. What do you think I should’ve used?

        1. Tharwen says:

          A png.

          Jpegs are basically only for compressing photos where you don’t notice the compression artifacts because the photo itself is so noisy. You can get around that by reducing the compression ratio, but by then you’re losing the advantages of compressing it in the first place.

          The other factor is that large flat spaces like the ones in that screenshot compress very well into the png format.

          It’s usually better to use png over gif because png supports transparency (irrelevant here, I know) and tends to compress better.

          1. bubba0077 says:

            Good to know. I’ve always used gif for stuff with just primary colors and jpeg for stuff with shades, photos, etc. But if png does both better, I guess I should switch.

            1. Tharwen says:

              Jpegs are still better for photos! (unless you want lossless compression)

            2. Zak McKracken says:

              PNG was developed to get around a patent issue with GIF, so it’s an improved version of GIF. Apart from animations, there’s nothing GIF can do that PNG can’t do better. Any colour depth from 2 to 16 million, lossless compression that works extremely well for line graphs (better than jpeg actually).
              So jpegs are really just for photos and other high-entropy stuff (if you can accept the artifacts vs. the size)
              pngs are for anything else (even photos if size doesn’t matter and quality does)
              TIFF is for anything above 8 bit per channel colour depth.

              … SVG and/or EPS are for vector graphics. Please don’t forget vector graphics exist…

          2. PhotoRob says:

            Ugh. I hate ongoing. They were invented by the same sort of people who gave us crappy like .7z compression and seem to exist solely to use excessive bandwidth.

            1. PhotoRob says:

              Can’t edit this on my phone, for some reason, but I meant my rant to be against png, not the word “ongoing”

            2. Zak McKracken says:

              Not quite sure what you mean by that, but for things like screenshots or line graphics etc. PNG is the single most efficient format.
              With very few exception, a GIF would always be larger than the same image as PNG, and PNG also beats TIFF, for the types of images that PNG does support.
              I’d guess that PNG could compress even more efficiently. but I’m sometimes surprised how efficient it actually is.

              Apart from that, I don’t know why the people exist who made PNG, but the fact is that GIF was covered by patents, so another format was needed, and currently there’s no alternative that I know which is better for the type of image PNG was designed for. — but if you know more than I, feel free to share.

  9. ooli says:

    I’m pretty sure a few year back you had a popular post list on the left and a “stuff I want you to see” list thingy.
    If I remember well it is how I went from just reading DM of the ring (the stuff that bring me in) into reading your gaming sword fight analysis, procedural project, your youth in university and un-related stuff.
    After that I browsed the archive for category I liked: D&D, game analysis, procedural stuff, and then I subscribed to the RSS feed, once I saw you had regular update.
    Everything not hosted by you was a pain: Chainsaw bikini and stolen pixel (I came for the DM webcomic so that was the 1st stuff I was looking after). I dont want to subscribe to the chainsaw illustrator, or Escapist. Having them organized like DM could be nice.

    Good luck.

    1. ooli says:

      Cant Edit. The popular posts, and posts you wanted us to see was on the right of course, not the left.

    2. Simon Buchan says:

      Holy shit do I want to read Chainsaw Bikini! That sounds AWESOME!

      1. krellen says:

        They made it a video game, with the operative addition of Lollipops.

  10. do you have traffic statistics via statcounter or google analytics? You should assess what fraction of your readers are indeed new, vs what fraction arrive via search engine, vs repeat readers. You may be trying to solve a problem that doesn’t exist.

    You can create Pages in WordPress devoted to each of your categories or features and then have a Pages widget on the sidebar. For example, a Page devoted to Programming Series that has hard links to the relevant entries. Repeat this for all the content categories you mentioned. WordPress will also allow you to create menu items for each page.

    You already have Pages for Minecraft Server and Spoiler Warning, you should rename “Author” to “About” (more standard) and remove Donate, Ask and Best Posts. The menu is teh wrong place for these. You already have a donate link on teh sidebar, modify that to include the actual Paypal icon. Best Posts should be a sidebar widget called Popular Posts, not in the menu. And unless you are actually getting mileage and usage from the Ask page, its probably not worth keeping in the menu; you dont need to delete it but instead you could refer to it with a link above the comment boxes. Note that wordpress allows you to specify what pages to include/exclude from your menu.

    I would drop the Archives sidebar dropdown entirely. No one browses by month and year. Also, change the setting on your Categories widget so it is *not* a dropdown.

    remove text RSS links from sidebar and instead add standard orange RSS icons somewhere up top. Ideally, search and RSS icons should all be grouped together at the top of the sidebar.

    The category icons across the top are cool but not prominent as they are small and dimmed. Make them all bright instead of just brightening on mouseover and make them bigger. Instead of mouseover alt text, which appears after a delay, add dynamic text that appears immediately that lists the category name and a brief line of witty description (be witty, but be descriptive).

    you may also find “sliding drawer” plugins to be useful:

    http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wordpress-sliding-drawer-content-area/screenshots/

    1. one more comment – your books should be given higher profile than your other content. I suggest a big thumbnail of Witch Watch right atop the sidebar, linked to amazon with your affiliate ID. It shoudl precede even the google ad. Add some flavor text about the book and a few blurbs from your most prominent reviews.

      1. LadyTL says:

        Honestly doing that would be really annoying. Even author home pages don’t do that kind of nonsense unless they have a page specifically for that book and sometimes not even then. That sort of thing is left for the sales page on Amazon, not a sidebar on a blog.

    2. Simon Buchan says:

      Thumbs up to all that, he’s covered everything I thought of and then 5 times more!

      Well, I guess I should mention, as a mainly RSS reader, that I tend to click through on your content since I normally intend to read the comments, and normally post myself. If you want to smooth the path for us ninja’s to becoming more active members, a simple link at the bottom to an anchor above the comments would be good, like so (obviously only to the RSS content):

      Comments »

    3. Zak McKracken says:

      agree to most of this except:
      “No one browses by month and year”

      Actually, it happens. But I wouldn’t mind at all not having take no screen estate on the main page. Could be a sub-item of search (like: have a search field, and a button to go to a “custom” search by tag, date, poster (to get Josh’s stuff e.g.), category etc.

      1. Dwip says:

        Actually, I browse by month and year all the time, especially on blogs I’m new to, where I’ve decided I like the writing but want to catch up with what’s come before. By year/month is the most natural way to do it.

        What DOES kill me is lack of previous/next post links within individual posts. Because you know what’s tedious? Browsing through month/year archives by clicking a post, reading it, clicking out, maybe forgetting where you were, clicking another random post, realizing you got the post you read five posts ago, clicking back…

        Maybe not as useful to those of us who have been around a while and know what to search for, but there is some value.

  11. As an extra note on RSS readers, the hit counts they give you (in your stats) don’t actually accurately represent how many of those people are reading, instead they basically give you a hit whenever they log in to their reader (or something useless like that). So they are more ninja than you may think.

    Also, typo in the last sentance of Other Information: C.
    Should be “…it’s sort of pointless…”

  12. Annie Moose says:

    Really, the only thing that I feel “needs” changing is the archiving, to make it easier to find those “best posts” you were mentioning. Every once in a while, I’ll go on an archive binge and read a whole bunch of posts on a particular topic, but I know I’m missing a lot of good ones. You do have the Best Posts link at the top with your favorite posts and the most-read posts, but what if it also rotated through other popular posts (most-linked, most-read, most recommended by Heather, picked out by a cat allowed to run wild on a keyboard, etc.), to draw some interest to things which may not be the most popular, but are still pretty cool?

    Also, and I know retroactive organization takes a long time and is annoying to have to deal with years later, but perhaps better organization of old article series? Specifically, I was recently going through your old Project Frontier, Terrain Project, etc. posts, and a few times, I had to hunt around for the next part because the only way that I knew to get to the next post was use the “Next” link (which sometimes led to a different programming post) or search through the Programming category directly (which, again, contains many things other than those series).

    I’m not sure the best way to deal with this. You don’t want to clutter up your main categories section with dozens of them for various series (that would completely undermine the point of categories, IMO), so perhaps subcategories? I’m a member of a writing/critique site that frequently posts series of posts (critiquing a particular book, for example), and this used to be a huge problem. More recently, however, they introduced subcategories, which classify articles more specifically if necessary. It’s a much easier way to read through a whole series in one go, and once older series were recategorized (which did take quite a while!), it doesn’t take any time at all for article writers to add the extra subcategory if it’s necessary.

    1. Annie Moose says:

      My last post was monstrously long, but I did have a couple of things I forgot to add.

      First off, you mentioned the size and proportions. I really have to say that I’ve always liked it. I have a widescreen monitor and the site has always looked great on it, taking up enough space that I don’t feel like I’m reading articles

      li
      ke

      th
      is

      but still having nice padding on each side so I don’t have to resize my window to half my monitor width to be able to read easily (which I do for sites where text sprawls all across the page–I simply can’t follow lines when they’re that long!). This also has the benefit of looking nice on smaller monitors like my work monitor (wait, I mean not my work monitor, why would I ever do something bad like read Twenty Sided at work…), although I’ve never checked a mobile screen. The font size is also nice. At first, I thought it was huge, but the large size actually makes articles very easy to read, there’s no squinting or leaning in to the screen.

      Second, I’m sort of an RSS reader (in that I generally only drop by when Google Reader tells me “hey, there’s a new post”), but I always actually click through and read the articles here. Not only do I like the formatting better (like I said before), but what would a Twenty Sided article be without comments? They’re a huge part of this site, and I wouldn’t give up being able to read them (and the often fascinating discussions we get into) for anything!

  13. X2Eliah says:

    Hm. Well, I noted a few complaints I have with what’s currently visible on opening the blog in this here pic..

    http://x2eliah.files.wordpress.com/2012/07/blogpic.jpg

    Don’t worry, I didn’t mention the waste of horizontal width of the entire thing, if you don’t like adaptive flow layouts, you don’t like ’em, nothing I can do there ;)

    1. Aezart says:

      “WHY ARE THERE NO ROLLOVER-UNCOVERING SUBMENUS HERE?”

      Please no. Rollover menus are entirely obnoxious, as are menus that scroll on the page with you.

      1. X2Eliah says:

        Then what? As shamus showed in this post, he needs to put in about 3 times as many links as there is room for ideally – and currently even the ones there are too large and of varying levels of interest/criticality.

        A nonexistent link, and an entire redundant menu, is, imo, far more obnoxious.

      2. bubba0077 says:

        You can do rollover menus in a way that isn’t garish and disruptive. The key is to keep them short, well-spaced (from each other and other content), not to move any content when they appear, and not have tertiary menus.

      3. Shamus says:

        I’m curious what makes them obnoxious. I’ve never used them myself, and I’m curious about any usability problems they might cause.

        1. X2Eliah says:

          Well, to be frank, they totaly suck on touchscreen devices, since they don’t have any ‘rollovers’. That much I will admit myself. But when they *do* work.. idk. I really dig those things.

          OH also, they won’t work if I have stuff like, say, NoScript enabled. BUT enabling noscript more or less breaks this site in a few ways anyway, iirc. So.. submenus + the main sections are clickable leading to a page that has links to all that submenuized stuff too?

          1. bubba0077 says:

            That can be fixed by making the rollover menus “stick” open if you click on the menu heading. Then they still work on a touch device (just click on the menu and the submenu appears).

            As for noscript: if you choose to turn off a lot of the mechanics of why things work on the web these days, of course things are going to be broken. Having not done much webpage coding myself, is there a way to have a fall-back behavior to what you describe (clicking the menu takes you to a static submenu page) when the script is not run? Without being a pain to code?

            1. X2Eliah says:

              Dunno about the fallback mechanics. I suppose you can just double the submenu hover mechanic with a simple clickable link as the actual element, why not – then the users can just pick what action they want to do.

              As for noscript – I do have it off for this site, but generally it’s just “on” to avoid random hostile scripts. I can’t really specify, afaik, a very precise level of exclusion – it just blocks [javascript] from [source], that’s it.

            2. Sumanai says:

              There’s a fallback tag in HTML/Javascript (haven’t done either in ages) that is run whenever the browser can’t or won’t do Javascript. I think it’s actually called “noscript”, but you know. Ages.

              How do you close the pop-ups in your example and is it possible? I would imagine the only way of getting it to work with minimum frustration to the user in the case of a misclick or mistaps is if clicking on the same place or anywhere that is not a link would close it.

              1. bubba0077 says:

                Your proposed methods sound good to me.

        2. Exetera says:

          First, I just don’t like them aesthetically; I am a bit happier with expanding-drawer style JS menus like those at the BBC, but I tend to dislike most other styles of JS menu.

          More importantly, though, most expanding JS menus are pains in the behind if you want to click something near them. You mouse to the thing you want to click, but miss and open up the JS menu. Now the target you were trying to click has moved. It’s even worse if you’re trying to click something in a JS menu and they’re laid out such that it’s easy to accidentally open a different menu in the process of clicking on the intended menu.

          1. Sumanai says:

            Or the menu that opens doesn’t move anything and covers the link you were planning on clicking. Or you accidentally move your mouse and open a pop-up menu that covers the text that you’re reading. And when you move your mouse in frustration outside of the window the pop-up doesn’t close because the code can’t register where the cursor is, since it can only tell the location when it’s inside the page and it never caught the location while the cursor was moving.

            And then there are the pop-ups that close when you’re trying to get to the correct link. Or they have an annoying delay when they pop-up so going through areas quickly in search of the correct one is a pain. Or the ones that don’t allow right-clicking or, and I’m surprised these even exist, don’t work with the middle-mouse button so you can’t open things into new tabs/windows.

            Pop-ups are one of the reasons why I installed NoScript in the first place, since the alternative interfaces tend to be less problematic. I’ve ran into pop-up menus that work, but I can’t remember right now where.

            There are also the cases where the always visible text doesn’t reveal that it is a pop-up link and at the same time doesn’t imply that there are sub-categories to begin with, so you’re unlikely to even try.

        3. Peter H. Coffin says:

          I don’t like ’em because they tend to open a lot when I’m just moving my mouse pointer away from what I want to actually look at, then this giant thing pops up and covers up what I’m reading anyway. It’s a very similar thing to the annoyance I feel when a web page goes dark to highlight the box that popped up over what I’m looking at to offer me a chance to “chat with a representative” or “tell us what you think” via a survey. At that very moment, you probably don’t have a ticky box for what I’m thinking, especially about getting my task interrupted.

          Stuff that interrupts annoys me WAY MORE than having to drill down through a couple of clicks to actually get to what I’m looking for. So a clicky-driven menuing system is okay, but that’s not meeting the criterion of making it all visible either.

        4. Zak McKracken says:

          Rollover menus are cool if they work correctly. Take little space, can contain lots of stuff.
          If they don’t work well, they will pop up anytime I don’t take enough care where the mouse is pointing, and then I’m struggling to close them again because they just covered what I was trying to read…
          I’m not a web designer so I wouldn’t know how to keep the latter scenario from happening. I do know that on some sites it happens a lot to me, and on others it doesn’t. The trick seems to be to make them go away very quickly if the user just came across the menu by accident, but not so quickly that it’s hard to select something without closing the menu again by accident. This works fine in all the software I use, but on the web it seems to be non-trivial.

          1. krellen says:

            Got some examples of ones that work correctly, because I’ve never seen them.

            Just as a for instance reference that most here will recognise, I find the new Escapist layout to be nearly unnavigable now.

            1. Zak McKracken says:

              Just dug this out for you. It’s German, though.
              The menu is at the very top, the entry point is not where I would accidentially hover with my mouse, and the menu is relatively compact, so no weird labyrinth to navigate your mouse through.
              Before this menu, they had all those items in a long horizontal list along the top, and kept adding more, so this is in my view a good change since it made the top bar much smaller while still giving pretty direct access to all the items in the menu.
              http://www.heise.de/

        5. Zukhramm says:

          I just hate everything that pops up, moves or changes on a website. I end up using older computers that catch fire if two things happen at the same time often enough that it annoys me. While most people do not, there are still phones, tablets and weaker laptops.

    2. Shamus says:

      Thanks so much for this. Also, to the others who are giving visual feedback. I still have the problem of prioritizing conflicting suggestions, but at least I can identify the problem areas like this.

      1. CTrees says:

        On the vertical space issue, he had it right-imagine how this looks on mobile. I primarily read on a tablet. In landscape, I see exactly ONE line of the actual article without scrolling down.

        1. Ingvar says:

          Hopefully, Shamus should be able to check how it looks on at least one particular model of smartphone now.

      2. Mark says:

        From looking at how he’s marked up that screenshot, I think I’ve figured out my problem, which I thought was with the width.

        It’s the void around the text.

        I’ll photoshop the solution. :)

        HERE!

        Does that explain it or do i have to use words? :P

        edit: holy cow, sorry for what imageshack did to that screenshot! Imgur wasn’t working. Anyone know a good fallback for when imgur is down?

        1. Aezart says:

          I use tinypic most of the time, which is owned by photobucket but doesn’t require an account and gives nice and short url.

          It has a limit of 1600×1600 on image size, and scales down above that.

      3. PurePareidolia says:

        I was bored so here’s an idea of a simplified version of the layout

        1. X2Eliah says:

          I’m a random commenter and this is my favourite suggestion in this whole comment thread.

        2. Shamus says:

          Yes. That is very good. Something like this will happen with the next update.

          1. Tuck says:

            This is great design to fix the layout issues, but please also put category and archive lists in expandable boxes in the right-hand side bar!

            1. PurePareidolia says:

              The idea with that was “Post index” Is supposed to cover both the archives and the categories, so it felt like doubling up, particularly with the category menu items. Still – there’s no reason that couldn’t happen if it makes things more convenient – vertical space isn’t exactly at a premium. Ideally you’d get a drop down list of categories from that menu item, just as each other one would have say, recommended posts and the “author” category would have “ask” and “donate” options.

              I know that doesn’t necessarily provide the individual month kind of focus the archive drop down does, but I think that’s kind of a terrible system as it is – You’re essentially guessing unless you already know what you want, and even then the big problem is it’s just a search filter, making it difficult to navigate. That’s kind of why I went with the separate page where there could be a more orderly and convenient list.

              It all kind of depends on whether being able to access it via the menu is less or more clicks than guessing from the sidebar, which would require some actual testing.

        3. Piflik says:

          I would move the top ad above the header, just like it is now, outside of the main body of the website…

          1. PurePareidolia says:

            The thing there is the ad is kind of twice the size of the logo – just from a design perspective it didn’t make sense to me that the first thing people see is the ad, then the logo. So putting it in the body of the site means you get to see all the menu items before the ad gets in the way, but it’s still between you and content, which is kind of the idea with sponsorship. Like how the donate button shouldn’t be the first thing you see, it’s just kind of my personal prioritization.

            1. Piflik says:

              I just think it is a bit disruptive. It divides the header from the content of the website, while the previous layout framed the complete website.

              1. Kacky Snorgle says:

                This. The ad above the header is less disruptive to the flow.

                If the ad above the header dominates the header too much, then make the header more prominent by using a taller, thicker (but not wider) typeface for “TWENTY SIDED”.

                The current location of the ad, between the header and the post title, puts the ad exactly where I expect the content to be, which is awkward.

                1. PurePareidolia says:

                  Even so I don’t necessarily like the “throw more vertical pixels at it” approach – the current one is as big as it needs to be, and just straight up competing with the ad size is a waste of space.

    3. Bubble181 says:

      I agree with pretty much all of this, speaking just for my personal taste.

      That the icons in the top bar are clickable menu links took me literally months, if not years, to discover. Once you know about them, they’re nice, but I can’t imagine anyone intuiting it.

  14. PurePareidolia says:

    I like the idea of making this a more generally accessible website, but it’d be hard to concept anything specific, being I’m not a website designer myself. Still, I’ll give it a shot. I think the most pressing need is for a good navigation page so you can find things without needing to search. Then stuff like Spoiler Warning can be merged into it. This could take a while to outline so bear with me.

    From a design standpoint I think the most convenient principle to choose is one of general going to specifics. So where your site now is currently a number of essentially separate mini-sites, the current focus is the blog only and everything else is a very generic link. You have a tonne of icons for tags, but they’re not very descriptive or useful when the search bar is that much more efficient for finding something specific. Something like a drop down menu, then the ability to find top posts by tag, or just index by popularity might be more useful. There’s not really any form of easy to browse archive and the previews given have the post count message which is pretty much superfluous information.You get very few per page, and no text summary.

    Similarly, there’s no “posts like this” segment for finding stuff with similar tags, limiting the amount of archive hopping you can do without resorting to search. Ideally you’d have proper ‘Post Index’ section to do all the showcasing and access everything. The archive should open with recommendations and allow people to get to a full list in a single click, with options for more a refined display just as easily.
    A layout might look something like:

    Entire Site
    -Featured Single Posts (View all posts)
    –[Here’s some popular ones – maybe about four each.]
    -Featured Series (View all series)
    –[Again, a main set here]
    -Featured Categories (View all categories)
    –[Here are the most popular categories on the site]
    Authors
    Shamus:
    -Featured Posts (view all)
    –[list of Shamus’ best posts]
    -Featured Series (view all)
    –[list of Shamus’ best series]

    …and so on.

    Each category could have a top 10 featured list at the top of the archive then sort chronologically or something. The idea is your navigation page has everything at your fingertips, the most popular posts are one click away and set out by author for easy reference, then if you’re looking for something more specific you can go to various lists and have a reasonable chance of finding things. Include avatar icons and a short summary of what people do on the sight for each author, and something similar with icons and synopses for the featured posts. Actual list posts need only the title, author, date and maybe a series tag, but they shouldn’t take up a lot of space so you should be able to fit a lot on screen at once. Maybe breaking them up by month tags could ensure it’s not too much of a text wall.

    Meanwhile a series could have a more elaborate page for them selves – a banner image, list of episodes (including episode titles because it makes navigation a lot easier) and a short synopsis of the series as a whole, with links to anything important and relevant. In the case of spoiler warning you might include a list of hosts and their portraits with descriptions of their roles, or just what they did over the course of the series. These pages should have comments for people’s overall thoughts on the season or something like that.

    So it might look like:
    Spoiler Warning Season 1
    [banner]
    <<First Season < Previous Season | Next Season > Latest Season >>
    Starring
    -[Avatar] Shamus – Commentator
    -[Avatar] Josh – Commentator
    -[Avatar] Randy – The player
    Synopsis: This is the first season of spoiler warning.
    Episode List
    -01) Character Creation and Eden Prime
    -02) The Citadel
    -and so on
    Comments

    Any link to season 1 would just take you there instead of to a given episode, so the Spoiler Warning category would have have links to each season, or maybe to the first episode off the bat. it’s kind of hard to describe without doing a mock up, but the gist of it should be you see the general stuff and then that can take you to the specific stuff you want with a minimum of effort. If you want a summary then you can see it on the main series page so you always have a point of reference, then maybe some external links to similar posts for further browsing.

    That should make it easy to navigate by way of answering your immediate questions then guiding you to where you can answer follow up questions:

    Q: “I want to see a Let’s Play”
    A: “Try the Post Index”
    Q: “This Let’s Play category looks good, which series should I start with?”
    A:“Spoiler Warning is a popular one”
    Q:“OK, Which season should I start with?”
    A:“Each one focuses on a game, pick one of interest”
    Q:“I’m interested in Alan Wake, what can you tell me about it?”
    A:“Everything important there is to now”
    Q:“I want to see the episode where they fight the taken”
    A:“Here’s each one, with titles to give you the gist of the content”
    Q:“Awesome”

    Contrast the current system:

    Q: I want to see a Let’s Play.
    A: It might be in ‘best posts’, or the category labels on the front page posts if one’s been posted recently, but they link to a post list, not a list by game. You’re not looking for a specific post but those are the only visible ways. The icons at the top are pretty but unlabelled and could mean anything – there’s not even an indication that they’re individual links until you mouse over them so you’re out of luck there. Spoiler Warning is an LP series, but you have no way of knowing it’s not a discussion forum with a lax spoiler policy. There’s also a category drop down menu on the side bar, but it’s not immediately obvious (I didn’t think of it until halfway through writing this). Or try searching a game and hope it’s an LP post, not a review.
    Q: Best posts has some individual posts and some webcomics. This is nothing like what I wanted – it doesn’t even look like you can find a series here.
    A: Most of those “Best posts” are in fact a series of posts on a topic but I’m not telling you that. You’ll have to try the search bar or the category menu
    Q: I’m trying the category menu, but the LP category doesn’t filter out individual posts like the recent L4D match, and is otherwise a massive, unsorted list. I can either try Ctrl+F to find a specific game or just scroll for eternity and hope there’s something relevant. Also I have no way of knowing if it’s a video or screenshot LP by looking at this.
    A: I can’t help you with that, but some of these are labelled spoiler warning, you’d better find the posts that don’t have spoilers to start with OH WAIT that’s the series name. Don’t I feel silly. I guess I should check out that menu option after all
    Q: Oh great! This must be all the LPs on the site. They don’t exactly correspond with every post I saw though, so where are the other ones?
    A: Back to the archives!

    You get the idea.

  15. TheeNickster says:

    Perhaps you could organize all the stuff you’d like to link to in a “The Shamus Young Experience” post. If it’s in a post, you can add words describing the things your linking to. Then you only need one prominent link somewhere at the top of the site.

    Think of it as an about page on steroids!

  16. Kdansky says:

    I’m still questioning the fixed 600 pixels. Even (especially!) my Smartphone will resize everything anyway, and I’ve stopped using browsers full-screen when my screens went above 20″. On my PC, I find the 600 pixels are barely enough for the actual post (800 or so would probably do it for me), and clearly too little to cope with the nested comments.

    The site looks absolutely ghastly on my phone, because of its fixed width. On the android standard browser (which is kinda crappy), 30% of the space is wasted (but the font is tiiiiiny). On Opera Mobile, about 60% of the page is just background, but when I zoom in, it completely re-does the layout anyway, throwing out the hard 600 pixel limit!

    So I’ve got half a dozen screens to test with, and on ALL of them, the 600 pixels are either ignored or a problem, but they never do any good. There is no one-size-fits-all-approach (and 600px is a one-size-fits-none-approach), and the only way to do it is to let the user’s device figure it out.

    1. Kdansky says:

      Update: I managed to take pictures! Volumne down + power button (hold a second) on ICS! Awesome! Pictures unmodified and unzoomed, just like the browser displays them without interfering. If I zoom in, the text will be reflown and looks decent (especially if I go below 600 px fixed size).

      I can take more pictures on my Galaxy S2 (4.x) if you need something specific.

      http://www.wuala.com/Kdansky/Shared/

      I’ve added and named a few more.

      1. Shamus says:

        It’s… doing… WHAT?!?!?

        That’s crazy. The header over the image is supposed to be the same width as the text. That text is NOT 600px wide, because the sidebar is 200px wide.

        Is this some broken CSS shenanigans? I have no idea. I don’t pretend to be an expert in CSS at all, so I can’t really intuit what’s wrong. I’ll have to look into this.

        Thanks for the screenshot. I wouldn’t have understood what you were talking about without it, since I wouldn’t have thought such a thing was possible.

        1. Kdansky says:

          Yeah, I figured as much, knowing a fair bit about CSS and other involved technologies myself. That’s why I tried to get a screencap.

          As for mobile browsers: They work best when they can reflow text freely, because they need to do that all the time.

        2. littefinger says:

          Way back when I followed a HTML course. There I was taught a series of code (javascript iirc) that detects the resolution a user is currently set at and allowed you to do different stuff according to the result. I mostly just used it for different background images but I think you can use something similar to load different css files.

          (I’ve forgotten all of the coding I learned there, but it was at the very top of the [body]part of the page, you’d send a request for the resolution, then nest commands according to the result eg if (resolution==800*600){do stuff}; if else (resolution==1600*1024){string=”showoff”)}

          I just used it so a browser didn’t have to load 5 versions of the same image for no reason whatsoever.

          1. Exetera says:

            You can do that with CSS3 media queries nowadays.

        3. Rick says:

          The header background image is on a div (which is narrowed by the browser to the content width) and not on the body tag. If it was on the body it’d go full width.

      2. X2Eliah says:

        Yuup. mobile browsers really do stink, alas :(

        1. Piflik says:

          Opera Mobile (not Mini) does a good job on my tablet (7”) regardless of if I identify myself as desktop or tablet. Same for the standard browser. Smartphone browsers are a different matter, though…

        2. lowlymarine says:

          Bizarrely, the only smartphone browser I’ve used that doesn’t absolutely mangle this site is IE9 mobile on Windows Phone. The effects of the stock Android and Opera Mobile browsers have been screenshotted here already, and Safari on the iPhone just squishes everything down to tiny unreadable text. IE9 Mobile resizes the default font while keeping the other element size and spacing the same, and the effect is actually quite pleasant. The only thing it does that’s a bit strange is the gigantic header text (Best Posts etc.) My guess is that everything is resized by some algorithm based on how the HTML presents it: h1, h2, etc.

          Here’s a picture of the effect. Sadly WP doesn’t have any screenshot functionality, but my trusty 2005-era digital camera did its best:
          http://img41.imageshack.us/img41/3236/hpim0448m.jpg

          Which leads me to another thing to note: a majority of the ads displayed on the site are Flash, which means they aren’t being shown to most mobile visitors (as even Android has Flash elements hidden by default).

      3. Bubble181 says:

        All of these are horrible – but I’m firmly of the belief that it’s impossible to write a page in such a way that it’s useful and sensible on all screens. Any lay-out that works for a 600*480px mobile screen will be rubbish on a 22″ flatscreen, and vice versa. Either you end up with consolification (remember those game menus that assume you’re looking at a non-HD tv, with HUGE buttons and whatnot?), or it’s illegible and everyone has to zoom in on a mobile screen.

        It may sound like a lot of work, but I think in the end it’ll be both easier, AND more efficient, to have a separate mobile page and a regular web page. This also means that the fixed 600px width can (but doesn’t necessarily have to) be left out.
        A lot of people like it, some don’t (I don’t have a huge screen, just 17″, but it’s still 1600*900 – 600 width is less than half that, and the rest of my screen is empty grey space…Not all that useful) – it’s a personal preference, really.

        1. Zukhramm says:

          As long as there’s no atuo-redirecting going on I’m fine with that, because my phone gives me the page pretty much exactly like it’s on my computer, and that works great.

          1. CTrees says:

            Um, this, exactly. Making it difficult for me to get the desktop version is infuriating.

            1. Strangeite says:

              Agreed. TwentySided renders great on my 3 year old iPhone and I hate when a website forces me onto a mobile page when I know the main page will look fine.

      4. Hal says:

        Hm, looks a lot different on my phone. I use the default Android browser, though.

        The problem I have is that the site looks the same on my phone as it does on my laptop. This is a problem because, without autoscaling the interface, the text is either too small to comfortably read in a single screen, or I have to zoom in and do a lot of scrolling.

        If there were a way to have the website follow different rules on mobile devices, I’d say that would be a good solution. But I have no idea.

        1. Kdansky says:

          One of the screenshots is with the default browser. Assuming you have Ice Cream Sandwich, you can take a screenshot by pressing both VolumeDown+Power for about a second.

          1. Hal says:

            Unfortunately, I’m on Froyo. Darn Android and their version stasis.

            This, I suppose, is part of the problem. Compatibility isn’t just about platform and browser, but which version of those you’re using. I’m not even sure what kind of priority mobile-friendliness is to Shamus.

            In any case, the browsing isn’t terrible, per se, but I much prefer mobile sites when the text refits to the screen, so I don’t have to fuss with zooming and scrolling too much.

    2. Shamus, waste some time looking through this: http://www.mezzoblue.com/zengarden/alldesigns/
      That’s the http://www.csszengarden.com/ archive, 210 example layouts for the site.

      You probably need to put on your coder hat and do some magic. Try to focus on HTML5 and CSS3 but sticking to the standards and not do any browser hacks. If you are mindful the markup and styling will cascade down properly to browsers that only support HTML4 and CSS1 for example.

      The Web Developer addon for Firefox is also really nice. Disable CSS temporay, do not show images. Force a window or viewport size (you can make presets to test 600 width or 1920 width etc.) Awesome toolbelt in other words.
      https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/web-developer/

      1. Sumanai says:

        Wait a minute. Wasn’t there a practical applicability problem with that site’s code? I remember reading something in 2006/2007 that made me dismiss the whole thing as too much effort for very little payback.

    3. krellen says:

      Just for the record, despite having two wide-screen monitors each over 20″, I still keep one sized 1152×864 (yes, yes, I know about ratios) for web browsing because it’s a hell of a lot easier to read than full widescreen resolutions, which is good for someone that does a lot of reading online. I find the site’s fixed width to be just about perfect.

      1. Sumanai says:

        If it neither stretches nor complaints about the resolution every time you turn it on you’ve got a nice piece of hardware there.

      2. You could always use Ctrl+ and Ctrl- to size text/pages.
        Also, adjusting or simply setting the system DPI/PPI correctly should fix most readability issues.

        With higher PPI screens setting the OS PPI higher will ensure more pixels being used to draw, so more detailed fonts and html rendering etc. (it’s the same as choosing higher res in games, at some point the resolution gets so good you don’t even need antialiasing).
        300dpi is the golden target.

        My own screen is set to 103% as it’s a 21.5″ with a native res of 1920×1080 thus more pixel dense (distance between pixels are smaller and the pixels are smaller too) than a large monitor with the same resolution. I did this on purpose, avoiding the 23″ for example in favor of the 21.5″ just to get a little higher PPI for the money.

        I’ve got a nice DPI calculator here http://www.emsai.net/projects/widescreen/dpicalc/
        Just enter screen size and native resolution and you’ll get the screens DPI/PPI, and the pixel pitch (this monitor spec is usually listed on many monitors).

        Interesting fact. A 21.5″ screen would need a native resolution of 5760×3240 pixels to pass the 300PPI border, any higher PPI would not be noticeable by the average current day human. At that resolution anti-alising is pointless as well, as you can no longer see the pixels, you can no longer see the stair-casing of aliased lines either.

        (even at 1920×1080 screens you will start to see diminishing benefits of going past 4x anti-aliasing. FSAA works by rendering at a higher res then scaling the image down to your resolution, so 4x AA and 1920×1080 could easily be around 300PPI detail)

        1. krellen says:

          I pretty much use one monitor for browsing, and the other monitor for everything else. Since, for the most part, I don’t stream 1080p, I don’t really need all that resolution anyway.

          1. Hmm! Unfortunately it’s not possible (at least not in Windows 7) to have a different PPI per screen. Maybe there is a registry hack or some driver tool that could do it but none I know of.

            As having onje screen set to it’s native res, but a very high PPI would give the same effect as your 1152à—864 under-res but without the pixelation/blurring you get now.

            I’d love that for development as well. Right now instead I have alternate test user accounts with high DPI settings.

            1. krellen says:

              I don’t get pixelation or blurring.

              1. Then the rescaling is done by the graphics card or the screen has a very good rescaler routine, your lucky.

  17. Piflik says:

    One thing I would change, is the little bar below ‘TWENTYSIDED’:

    Move ‘Ask Me A Question’ into the Author page, so you have space for the search bar and a direct link to your books.
    Then make it stay at the top of the screen, as soon as you scroll below it.

  18. Radagast says:

    Hmm. Well I like the layout as it is, other than Kdansky’s points above. However, I think there may be a simple way to fix things.

    If I’m understanding correctly, it is mainly the “random” visitors to the site you want to attract to stay.

    Why not add something to the bottom of every blog post, somewhat like your “bio” paragraph on The Escapist… And just put three important links in there. About Me, Top-10 posts, My Books.

    You could have more than three, that’s just what came to mind for me. This would appear between the text of the post and the first comment. You could make it graphical too if you wanted.

    1. X2Eliah says:

      Not at the bottom of a post, but at the bottom of the current widgets. Because ALL Shamus’ posts, with the comments, reach far further down that the widget sidebar.

      1. Radagast says:

        Or in both places.

        1. Sumanai says:

          Both or just under the post itself, since a random visitor is more likely to decide to check more from Shamus after they’ve read something than in the middle of reading it, right at the part where they can see the links on the widget bar. They might check the very top or the very bottom, but are unlikely to check the widget bar’s bottom specifically.

    2. Epopisces says:

      Similar to what your articles already do on Experienced Points :)

  19. bubba0077 says:

    Been thinking more about the advertisement issue. I understand the need to keep them in a prominent location on the page, but have a suggestion and a possible suggestion:

    1) If you keep the sidebar information (most suggestions including mine eliminate the need), find a way to make it the same width as the skyscrapper ad. This would both look better and allow you to widen the content area a bit (perhaps 650 px?) without increasing actual page width

    2) How well would the horizontal ad do as a spacer between the end of the post and the comments instead of across the top?

    1. Piflik says:

      I personally wouldn`t like an ad between the post and the comments. Ads should be separated from the content and not interfere with it.

  20. Dude says:

    One thing that I like when sites do it is have next/previous post/post in this category links both on top of the post and below all the comments. When I reach the bottom of a particularly long comments thread for, say, one of your multipart Saints Row The Third articles, I don’t want to scroll all the way to the top to find the next/previous post in the series.

    It’s a very lazy thing to expect, because it’s functionally just one more key press (HOME key) to take you to the top, but it’s still one more key press.

  21. “RSS Viewers ““ I don't use an RSS reader myself, so I often forget about these folks. They read the posts in their reader. They don't comment, they don't see the various links in the sidebar or the menu on top, they don't see any of the cosmetic features of the site, and they don't see the ads. These people are like ninjas, viewing the content without leaving any trace.”

    These is only a specific kind of RSS user. I often read your posts in my RSS reader, then jump to the main page to read and comment. My impression is often that the page is so cluttered, because I am used to the bare experience of the RSS reader. I keep up on every post that happens, so less is more when it comes to site navigation for me.

    I think highlighting new and important content is most important. I think Giantbomb does a great job with their highlighted content on their homepage. Sometimes its an article, sometimes its a video. But there is something new and exciting jumping up when you visit.

    Then the navigation menu is broken up in to categories that are easily understood, and broken into submenu to easily jump to what you want. I can go from the homepage to the list of Quick Looks in a minimal number of clicks.

    1. Peter H. Coffin says:

      I’m pretty similar to this. The RSS feed makes the posts show up elsewhere, where I do read several times a day, which triggers me to go load up the actual post in another tab for when I’ve got the headspace. But (differently) all I need is the reminder, and a bit of context. I don’t read the whole posts there, even though there all there in the reader, and I’d be perfectly happy if the RSS entry only contained the title, the link, etc, and the first paragraph or so.

      1. Just to echo Peter, I’d be fine with just a summary in the RSS feed as well. Not everyone is worth jumping through for full articles, but Twenty Sided always is.

  22. Cordance says:

    The question I would always ask myself when looking at a website is, how easy is it to become a part of it. A static front page is generally speaking not a great thing. If you log into shamusyoung.com there is no indication of what is active vs completed. I would have to say your base address is the dullest page of the blog that does not encourage or direct use of the website. Personally I love the monthly archives and it is how I navigate the website (see below).

    I feel that the donate button at the bottom of every post seems like a good location for it. The bottom of the side bar is not always the point when people look across towards it.

    I am probably unique in the way I browse regular content updated websites. I have an entry point. I follow that until I decide I want to check the content frequently. Then I use the most easy way to get to new content (any content I may have missed since I was last on the site.)
    My entry point website was DM of the rings from the link on escapist. I wandered into spoiler warning, at which point I bookmark it here Spoiler warning Mass effect part 4 which I still use to enter the website. I use the month archive list for the current month to find the new content.

    1. X2Eliah says:

      … Use shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/ as the baseaddress then?

      1. Peter H. Coffin says:

        That’s my main entry point and bookmark…

    2. We have talked about making Shamusyoung.com redirect to a static WordPress front page (vs the dynamic content of the blog) with links to all the various bits of the site including the stuff on the current front page.

  23. Attercap says:

    Honestly, I don’t have too many issues with the site. My only suggestion would be to change the iconographic navigation with only tool-tip as text, not just because it’s soooo 1999, but also because it fails both the grandma test and usage implementation on mobile browsers (which lack easy hover states).

    X2Eliah mentioned this as well, I see… Good on him/her.

    1. X2Eliah says:

      Good on him/her.

      One of those, yep. :)

      1. Sumanai says:

        Damn. I would’ve bet on “it”.

  24. guy says:

    Make like Rutskarn and have a set of tag links on the sidebar.

  25. Exetera says:

    I think my big issue with site navigation is how dysfunctional the WordPress categories are. You’ve set them up to be big, flat categories, so if I click on (say) Programming I get a list starting with Physics Engine, then every Project Octant entry, then some random posts, then Project Frontier, and then every other programming post all the way back to the beginning of your website. That’s actually relatively useful if I’m looking for a recent Project Octant post, but if I’m looking for (say) AI Follies I’ve got to flail on the scroll-wheel or go jackhammer on Page Down until I reach it. This is aggravated by the fact that each entry is shown with its title in zillion-point font, the number of comments shown two different ways, the category name and image (on the category page), and with a generous helping of whitespace above and below – ie. each post takes up a lot of vertical space.

    There isn’t really a better way to do it for the unconnected posts; “Physics Engine” doesn’t really go with anything. For the many series, however, a category page or some other kind of index that looks more like this would be much more useful: provide the series title, a description of the series, and maybe an image taken from it to jog readers’ memories, and then a much more vertically condensed listing of the articles in it.

    One other thing about categories: too often, the images seem chosen to be clever rather than informative. Yes, using Agent Smith as the icon for programming articles is very cute… no, it’s not obvious at all that it means “programming” when you’re looking at a giant row of icons. (There are also two icons with dice on them. I mean, come on now.)

    Oh, and since we’re talking about design, could you fry the black-on-gray thing you’ve got going with the text? Reduced contrast is no fun.

  26. Varil says:

    On “making content more visible”, I’ve been a regular visitor for years. Since DM of the Rings was still running, maybe, or at least not long after it stopped. BUT, those buttons at the top don’t look like buttons to me. I mentally parse them as a banner, either for your website or as part of the ads at the top. They could stand to be more obvious that they are, in fact, links to other parts of the site. Possibly with visible labels dividing them into categories.

    In example : “Other Entertainment : “, with maybe subcategories divided in some hopefully sensible way. “Older articles”, “Webcomics by Shamus”, “Related Media”(which might include Spoiler Warning, and anything I’m forgetting off-hand).

    Of course, this is a ‘what makes sense to me’ change, but I don’t know how other people see those buttons. It just seems like the content is already being advertised, it just isn’t obvious that what you’re looking at is an ad. You don’t want to go full geocities on us, but it couldn’t hurt to help them stand out a little.

  27. Littlefinger says:

    On a slightly different note, maybe we can suggest some site Shamus can use for inspiration. By ripping them off.

    I nominate Flash of Steel. It has most of the things shamus might want: “3 moves ahead” would be let’s play (spoiler warning/josh plays/potential future stuff); features/series would remain the same (adventures in coding), store would link to the book section, portfolio is the webcomic section, community stuff like twitter & minecraft server links could go in the column left/right, and so on.

    I would suggest using drop-down menus more than they do, though (eg webcomics would not go to a page with a list of links but open a menu with the 3 webcomics (which would go to an overview page for the relevant topic). Basically as few pageloads as possible – keeping in mind the necessity of index pages.

    I think this site is a useful template to build on.

  28. Michael says:

    The “Archives” month-by-month link needs to be more visible. I hadn’t taken on board that it was there, or that it listed posts by month, until I started writing this post, despite having been reading the blog for a couple of years. Turns out it solves my pet peeve with the site,* but it’s tucked away in a tiny space just below the ads and I never see it or think of it when I actually need it.

    Maybe, since it doesn’t take up much space, you could just move it above the ad so it’s next to the search box?

    * Sometimes a post will say, “I’ll have more to say on X in an upcoming post,” but the post being referred to ends up being filed under a different category. In these cases it can be a pain to scroll and click through pages of search results or to guess the correct category and then find the post from its title alone. Being able to navigate straight to the month in question and browse across all categories solves this, but I didn’t realise I could do it.

  29. Phil says:

    I’ve always enjoyed the site. I spose that’s not a lot of helpful commentary on changes, but I’ve never really had a problem with it the way it is.

  30. Solf says:

    I don’t know how useless such input would be — but just in case.

    I use RSS to read posts (both to know that the new one is up and to read it in the common reader font) and *then* I typically go to site to glance through comments.

    For these purposes the site seems fine.

    So I guess the request is — whatever gets changed, please don’t break “read in rss + check comments on site” functionality :)

    1. I have RSS feeds from a lot of sites in Thunderbird (email program, Firefox engine based), and when I see new posts pop up I peek and if it’s really interesting I go to the link/site.
      In addition I also “drop by” twentysided and check that way now and again, it depends really on what I’m doing.

      Usually I only heed to type “tw” in the URL bar of Firefox and it’ll pop up twentysided as the first suggested url.
      Although I noticed now that just typing “t” lists twentysided as No.2 bee a bit stalky recently I guess.

  31. ENC says:

    I agree; biggest problem is seeing old content. I hate sorting things by date; it’d be betteer if somehow you rangled text forms of the top bar that links elsewhere onto the page; so someone can say ‘ooo programming’, or ‘ooo he wrote a fantasy book based on Victorian-era England?’ Preferrably on the right, although they’d have to link to all their topics (preferably by year) then you click on it again and receive the individual posts as a list (of which some aren’t numbered).

    As it stands, a programming entry may be interrupted a few times, or you get a case like I didn’t know you had an anime site until a few months ago and I’ve been here for only 2 years.

  32. Shamus, I just had a bit of an idea– what abut taking those buttons across the top and making those sidebar links– they would be more obvious as links, maybe?

    1. Tuck says:

      There is tons of unused space down the right-hand side, and the categories would be far better as links than as entries in the dropdown. Similar for the archives, although I’d suggest the archives should be in an expanding box that defaults to collapsed (i.e. click to see the links to all the months/years).

      Lots of great suggestions in the comments above, but the really necessary ones to solve the issues you have are:

      1. Tags or subcategories.

      2. A better site overview/landing page/table of contents with clear links to either categories or particular posts or series. This should be both the shamusyoung.com homepage and accessible through the links in the title bar (that’s where people look for Home-type links).

      3. Better use of space. X2-Eliah’s post details the worst offenders. Other people pointed at the archives, which also need reworking.

      I’m a professional web designer/developer and I’d be more than happy to donate my time and HTML/CSS/Javascript skills. Similarly with graphic design but I don’t think that’s broken other than the spacing. Drop me an email if I can be of help!

      1. Falling says:

        Regarding the right side. I wonder if would be possible to have little pictures/buttons on the right side for content that needs to be easily accessible such as books, DM of the Rings, Terrain, Pixel City etc, etc.

        Could you fit 2 side by side?
        Maybe there’s too many to fit on the right side or maybe the pictures would scrunch too much, but it could be a way of highlighting the bigger projects without changing too much about the site.

        At the very least having a separate section for big projects would be nice beyond what the archives do.

  33. David says:

    I’m another reader that subscribes to your RSS feed, and then opens the post in another tab when I want to read the comments, or just want to read it later. Note: If you need to change the RSS URL itself, please be sure to leave a final post at the old feed’s URL that says to resubscribe to the new URL. (I’m wary of leaving it to HTTP redirects.)

  34. Thrawn says:

    Your thrust here seems to be aimed at helping newcomers find interesting content, but while doing so you also want to keep old-timers happy. Now, I have not read all 9001 comments so I apologize if someone suggested this already, and I am not a web programmer, so I don’t know if this is doable. But if you significantly change your layout, it would be very nice to have the option for those of us who already know your categories to opt out of certain categories that don’t interest us, or we don’t want to see at the moment.

    My thinking is this: maybe I’m browsing through older content, but I don’t have time to watch a let’s play series. Those series can get really long and take up a huge block of space in the newsfeed. If I could select a category (or categories) to not be shown, either temporarily or by changing personal settings (which probably would require logging in or cookies… I dunno), the same way I could select a category to be exclusively shown, I think it would incentivize people to look at broader selections of posts while still allowing them control over what is shown.

  35. Sydney says:

    If the goal is to help newcomers see content that draws them in / keeps them coming, I think a few metrics would be handy. What I mean is, when I go to a new-to-me YouTube channel, the first thing I do is click “Videos -> Most Viewed” and see if I like what I see. Usually it’s their best, or at least their highest-profile, work.

    Maybe adding a bit more description to the categories (Game Design, Game Reviews, and Video Games doesn’t tell me a lot), and then having Most Viewed and Most Commented organization orders on top of Newest First would help with that.

    (also, I might as well note in case it’s useful that it wasn’t link-walking but the Random button that got me hooked on xkcd)

    1. Falling says:

      That would actually be really nice. That is definitely one of the tools I use to find more content from a creator I stumbled upon. I liked the first, well else do they have… what has the most views, what has the most comments.

  36. Zak McKracken says:

    A word on facebook, twitter and whatever other social media links are on the site:

    There are scripts that will only activate these beasts when clicked. sort of like you see them here:
    http://www.wuala.com/Kdansky/Shared/
    (thanks Kdansky for giving me the example)
    This doesn’t allow facebook to give me a tracking cookie on a site that isn’t facebook. And it still gives you the functionality the original had, with a single click per user, per browser (the on/off state is stored in a cookie).

    You can get the code here:
    http://www.heise.de/extras/socialshareprivacy/
    … but the page is in German. the script isn’t though, so hope it helps.

  37. Phantos says:

    I have always felt there was a distressing lack of dinosaurs on your website, Shamus.

    That is my only complaint/suggestion.

  38. WWWebb says:

    I know it goes against the blog paradigm, but it might be nice to be able to skip to the beginning of a series (like DMotR or a Shamus Plays) without scrolling to the bottom of that page. Once you get into the posts, there are “next post” links, but it might be nice to easily start at the beginning. A “first post” link maybe?

  39. Volatar says:

    I just want a forum for this community. Everything else seems fine as it is to be honest.

  40. Oleyo says:

    I know you are familiar with him, but I think you should take Lileks as your exemplar in this area for the following reasons:

    1) He has a metric butload of disparate content reaching back to the dark ages of the Information Superhighway. As you know, it scoffs even at your not insignificant archive.

    2) He has an active community of commenters on a long running blog.

    3) He has a pretty good eye for design.

    4) He is super picky about presenting/accessing data.

    Now, I don’t think you should just copy his layout, obviously you don’t need it. His site is always changing since he is so picky and has so much content. You don’t want that either presumably, but it does mean he has weeded out and refined a lot of design ideas.

    So what should you copy? (in my opinion)

    a) I think you have graduated to the need for a “front page” to explain a bit about who you are and where your site came from. All of your content could be linked with brief explanations. Important items and ads can be placed with a bit more freedom on this front page and tweaked as needed. This paves the way for…

    b) Subsections. Each type of content (including the blog itself) would get its own page and you could eliminate elements which only need to be on the front page and keep elements that you want everywhere. Also, you could have a little fun with the style/format of these sections and have room for broader explanation of your different content. Things like spoiler warning could get a deeper explanation of the concept and the people involved. Your blog could have the relevant rss feed links handy, etc.

    Anywho, I know you are familiar with his page and have probably already thought about it, but maybe my 2c is handy.

    PS: I personally think that a forum would not be good. I like the tight, focused conversations linked to your blog posts.

  41. LunaticFringe says:

    Random story about your website’s structure…I showed my cousin Twenty-Sided Dice awhile ago cause I thought Spoiler Warning would appeal to her bizarre sense of humour. She’s a graphic design major who makes websites and started picking it apart. I said that I did think she had a point, for example, the fact that there’s no real categorization of articles. She replied that yes there was, they were the little pictures above the title that just look like random background images. After a massive binge of articles I realized I hadn’t figured it out in the ten months that I had been checking out Twenty-Sided.

    I don’t know if this is a story about me being a complete idiot or about how your website might be difficult to access for new-comers.

  42. Dwip says:

    I’ve left scattered comments elsewhere, but on the off chance you make it this far down…

    1. So, is http://www.shamusyoung.com/ actually an entry point used by real people? Has it ever been? Which is to say the following:

    – There’s nothing there particularly that isn’t better off being a link on the blog, and almost all of it is a link on the blog already;

    – In other words, is there a reason why you don’t make Twenty Sided the default entry point to everything else and call it a day, since it may as well be anyway? The blog is pretty much the heart of this site. May as well treat it that way.

    – As a reader, I’d much rather have a page that I know is going to be updated with new content regularly rather than a static page that only gets updated when the author remembers it exists (and the lack of your latest two books may be a hint, there).

    2. Not to echo the crowd, but the pretty category icons are a thing that look way cool inside posts, and are completely unusable as an actual navigation tool. I’m going boldly where many have gone before and so don’t want to belabor the point, but I’ve been a reader since before they were a thing, and I still have no idea what most of them are.

    3. To continue my streak of original commenting, you really, really need either some system of subcategories or way more tag use, and some sidebar way to get there from here. Many, many series get created, and many, many series are hard to find.

    4. Also, Spoiler Warning deserves to be its own top-level category seperate from the LP category. This might sound odd, but the problem I have is that the sheer number of Spoiler Warning posts completely drowns every other post in the LP category. Do I want to read the Shogun LP? I can, but only after I scroll through 80 posts of Spoiler Warning eps that I’ve already watched.

    That said, most of the time if I want to watch Spoiler Warning eps, I go to the actual Spoiler Warning page, which is amazing and I wish you had more of them for more projects. The category idea is mostly to help promote the other LPs.

    5. On the subject of 600px width and all that, I personally find your horizontal use of space to be just about right, though the sidebar is wider than it technically needs to be. I tend to keep browser windows open half screen on a widescreen monitor, and the blog works fantastic with that.

    6. On the subject of “best posts” and the like, one of the things I do on my very small time blog but that I’ve seen other places as well, is annually or so I’ll comb my archives for what I think were the 5-10 best posts of the year, and link to them in my annual “Wow, my blog got a year older today! I’ve been doing this for how long?” post. Given your vastly greater scale of interesting content, this may be useful to people.

    7. Have comments been mentioned lately? Because two things there:

    – The dice numbers look cool but are completely unreadable by humans. They’re basically just pretty decorations. Which is nice and all, but.

    – Threaded commenting: Still a complete disaster to follow updates to. Handy for discussions that have concluded, but for anything ongoing straight up lists seem more usable to me. Milage likely varies.

    [edit] Speaking of which, it occurs to me that WordPress has the ability to do an RSS feed for comments on an individual post. For instance, this, for which there is some magical template way to get to that I forget offhand. May be useful to people.

    1. Vipermagi says:

      On 1.; the About Me link points to a non-existant page, ie a 404. Which is broken. “Who is this guy?” “A broken 404.”

  43. Paul Spooner says:

    Overall, I like the way the site is now… but my website isn’t a paragon of usability, so maybe you should just ignore my advice. Also, I’ve been coming here for a long time… Let’s see, if I were new, what would I like?

    I actually enjoy having to dig for stuff. A bit of mystery. It’s kind of like a game… I suspect there is gold buried in this website… I just need to uncover it! Plus along the way I could uncover lots of other valuable stuff. Iron, Coal, maybe a diamond or two and suddenly I’m making a Minecraft metaphor!

    It’s possible that the site is too easy to use. Could you have the landing page redirect the visitor to a random piece of content? (Your blog, your twitter, your book, a webcomic, whatever!) Obviously this could get complicated fast. You could use data mining to weight the randomization table so that people are more often redirected to popular content… or the other way around! You could query the incoming link to divert the visitor to something likely to interest them immediately. But a simple random redirect for “www.shamusyoung.com” could be interesting.

    Above all, a well connected site will encourage exploration (it seems to be well connected already? Huzzah!). You could have a “random links” sidebar that just has a few procedurally generated links on it to content vastly different than the content currently displayed. Whatever the case, more internal links couldn’t hurt. If all else fails, take a look at http://www.mcmaster.com/ for ideas. They have the absolutely best UI design I’ve ever seen, by far.

  44. robert says:

    for the Important content you mentioned. here is a quick and ‘easy’* thing to do for it.

    the good content does get lost to those who don’t archive binge, but a lot of people will be brought in by one topic, and visit often, but miss the old good topics too.

    So how about a random highlight on the sidebar?

    just a headline that says: “hey did you know that…”
    and randomly picks a headline from your list (probably with an appropriate picture.)

    it wouldn’t have to be a big deal. get one headline per main topic (those pictures in the top of the site that people might ignore) or maybe one per project.

    Sure you have the picture links in the top of the site, but people miss that.

    so how about:

    “Hey did you know that…”

    “I wrote a book” (link to book)
    I like system shock 1 (link to free radical)
    I wrote a comic (link to comics section)
    I wrote for the escapist
    The fellowship of the ring makes for awful PC’s
    I like to program
    i made a city that builds itself
    i like to play games and show them to you
    rutskarn sometimes plays games too
    josh likes to play games too
    I played mass effect so you don’t have to
    you can donate money to feed my starving pet monkey
    My life is mildly more interesting than yours? (link to autobiography)

    and much much more.

    I’m thinking it would be relatively quick to implement, but might have a goodly effect on introducing people to new content. the hard part is coming up with catchy titles, but that’s pretty much how I found it to begin with. I saw you writing about the Let’s code, hit the matrix guy, and found this cool stuff about the procedural city. Most of your stuff, I just stumbled upon it. But a random headline might just help people stumble upon other stuff. (and you can make it unintrusive if you want)

    *i have no idea how hard or easy it is, and should not be used as a reference

  45. Maldeus says:

    So, about directing new posters to new content in a quick and easy way, that’s already really easy to achieve. ShamusYoung.com doesn’t really host anything except links to your blog posts, links to your YouTube series also linked in your blog posts, and Free Radical. Which means that right now its main purpose is seriously just to direct people to Free Radical.

    Use the main page of ShamusYoung.com as a place to link to the highlights of your blog, since that’s actually what it already is and just isn’t doing a very good job of it. When you link people from your Escapist articles or YouTube videos or wherever, link them to that home page. The banner up top should also link back to that home page. All the stuff that needs linking goes there. And also Free Radical. Tangential note, am I the only one who kind of misses the archive of Shamus’ political comic on the home page? It’s not that I actually read it, so much as that I’m inexplicably bothered by the information being lost.

    Those of us looking for new posts already go to shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale specifically (or else we’re already in the habit of clicking through to the newest post), so no one in your audience even has to adjust to anything.

    Unfortunately I have no idea how to tackle the other two problems.

  46. Strangeite says:

    I would filter every suggestion through how it helps me with my ultimate goal.

    Unless I am mistaken, the goal is to A) maintain regular readers, B) bring in new readers and C) turn new readers into regular readers. Rinse and repeat. Prioritizing in this manner will increase page views and indirectly increase revenue.

    Discussions of CSS syntax and the benefits of hovertext versus dynamictext is not my bailiwick.

    There are some very good suggestions here, I wish I had the ability to up vote those that I particularly agree with because it will be easy for great ideas to get lost in the noise. But I guess that is the nature of the beast and why you are asking for suggestions.

    As for examples, I checked out the BoingBoing site mentioned earlier and find that it does an excellent job of looking uncluttered while showcasing a large amount of material.

    The site that sucks me in longer than any other besides TVTropes is The Onion, specifically because of the suggested articles at the end of each piece. I find myself always being sucked into reading “just one more”.

    I still feel that the comment system needs an overhaul. It works great when comments are in the dozens, but when they approach triple digits, they become unwieldy. Plus, a forum would be an excellent location for people to really get into the nuts and bolts of designing a new page (wink wink).

    Thanks Shamus. I am rooting for you.

  47. nmichaels says:

    Flash ads don’t work for me. I whitelist sites that I use regularly in adblock, and usually adblock is off, but I won’t ever turn off the flash blocking plugin. Pure text ads are the nicest, and regular image banner ads are okay, but flash and I have an adversarial relationship and I’m happy being the winner. Flash ads remind me of the animated gifs and <blink> tags of the mid ’90s, but more malicious.

    I do buy dice periodically, and the web site I buy them from (when the local shop doesn’t have the 60 d10s I need) advertises on this site. So I’m happy to click through here to get my dice.

    I too put all my skill points into coding, so I don’t have any advice.

    1. swenson says:

      I haven’t done anything with ads myself, but image/Flash ads bring in a lot more revenue than text ones, and I suspect Flash ones bring in more than mere image ones. That’s undoubtedly the reason Shamus uses them, text ads just don’t bring in very much.

      Personally, so long as they’re not too obtrusive (no sound, no pop-ups/unders, none of those obnoxious videos that takes up the whole screen at random), I don’t mind even animated ads on sites I like. Like you, I typically use AdBlock, but this is one of the handful of sites I whitelist.

  48. Anachronist says:

    “A good website needs these skills, in this order: Good interface design, good graphic design, and good coding.”

    Nonsense. As a counterexample, I offer you Wikipedia, one of the world’s most successful websites, which arguably has the order good coding, good interface design, good graphic design. In fact, the graphics are more or less perfunctory.

    1. Shamus says:

      Correction: A good ENTERTAINMENT website needs these skills, in this order: Good interface design, good graphic design, and good coding.

      This is not a reference site, and looks matter.

      1. Anachronist says:

        Yes, looks matter for an entertainment website, but I disagree that graphics on this site are as important as you make them out to be.

        This is a good looking site already. With the exception of DMotR, the site doesn’t make heavy use of graphics except when necessary to illustrate a point. The bulk of your content (at least what attracts me) consists of text, particularly your coding projects and other commentary articles. If your primary content is text, then wouldn’t graphics be the least of your concerns? An attractive layout (i.e. interface design) matters most in that case. In my view, coding follows, since good coding is critical for a good interface on sites with any dynamic content. Graphics would be last. But you know best, it’s your site and your vision, after all.

        1. Zukhramm says:

          Good graphic design doesn’t mean much graphic design.

  49. --GJ-- says:

    I really wish the comments did nesting better. Right now, as they keep nesting, the box around them shrinks, but only on the left side. Ideally, I feel like it would shrink on both sides so they stayed centered, or something.

    IDK, it just looks awkward whenever threads get 5 or 6 comments deep, and then they expand back out.

    1. bubba0077 says:

      That would just either make them get really narrow faster, or make the nesting harder to see.

      1. Aldowyn says:

        The biggest problem is when you finish one thread of comments-on-comments, read a reply to the original comment, and you’re like “wait, what is this a comment to again”? Then you have to scroll back up, following that tiny margin on the left until you hopefully find the right comment…

  50. X2Eliah says:

    Alright. I like this look. You could easily add all kinds of extra widgets on the side – categories etc, by the way – there’s lots of room, as the current widgets don’t reach down far.

    Otherwise – yeah, I like this look.

    1. PurePareidolia says:

      Yeah, this is nice, I like it.

      1. Scott (Duneyrr) says:

        Looking much cleaner. I like this as well.

  51. Irridium says:

    Like the look. But is there any way to re-add the icons at the top that linked to different sections (anime, games, coding, rants, ect.)?

    1. Attercap says:

      Looks like the categories can be reached via a tool in the right nav. On the home page it gets a bit buried under the twitter feed, though.

      Shamus, would you be adverse to putting the Categories and Archives above the ad? There’s quite a bit of scrolling to get to what feels like secondary navigation.

  52. Steve C says:

    In regards to “C. Search should always be available.”:

    The search feature doesn’t work well. That’s pretty common of most (99.9%) websites. Search needs to find the pages with an extremely high correlation to you are looking for and present that in a way that is instantly useful.

    Case in point, your search function has gotten worse over the years on this site. Which isn’t surprising because the quantity and breadth of content have both increased. But (here’s the important part) it doesn’t matter. Google won the battle years ago.

    Compare the results of the search button in the top right side of this page for “website redesign”:
    http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?s=website+redesign

    to the results of google’s generic sitesearch feature:
    google.com site:http://www.shamusyoung.com website design

    IMO There’s no comparison.

  53. Steve C says:

    How about a “Find out what else is on this website!” button/link on every page. (With a better title.*) Probably at both the top and at the very bottom after all the comments.

    This wouldn’t be a search at all. It would bring people to a page that is specifically designed to tell people who don’t know about all the things you’ve done… well… about the things you’ve done. It would be graphically pleasing and have a straight forward interface. Kind of (exactly) like this.

    Just add links to Witchwatch, your programming series and everything else you’ve forgotten about.

    (*Not simply “home”)

    1. Kacky Snorgle says:

      Actually, I think “Find out what else is on this website!” is a pretty good title for that link. It tells me exactly what will happen if I click on it, after all.

      I’d probably keep it just at the bottom of the page, though (not in the footer, but below everything else except possibly the pile-o’-dice). Either there, or somewhere in the right column. There’s more than enough at the top of the pages already.

  54. Thomas says:

    Arghhhh! You’ve changed it! Now everything sucks!

    Seriously though, we’re probably better off without those icons, it was really hard to notice them and I could never quite trust the anime one…

    1. Artur CalDazar says:

      For a moment I was confused thinking “something changed, but I don’t know what”.

  55. evileeyore says:

    Hey Shamus one question:

    When I click on the “Best Posts” link why does it only have Rutskarn’s posts? I think you got something backwards in there…

    ;)

  56. Rick says:

    I’m a web developer (but not a graphic designer) by trade and have a couple of suggestions…

    Shorter intro snippets… make get people hooked then get them to click through to the page. This creates an extra ad impression and also shows the comments to hopefully engage the visitor further.

    Large footers are common, you could spilt it into sections: Videos/Programming/Comics with the “best-of” linked under the headings

    Populate the sidebar, your posts are long so you usually have a nice long sidebar to work with.

    RSS – put ads into the feed or shorten the snippets. I use RSS and always click through to read on the site so I can see comments.

    Search or Contact – people look to the top right and bottom right when lost. You’ve already got this covered.

    If not a footer then maybe a “related posts” section below each article for when people finish reading.

    You’ve got good colours and font, very good for reading.

    WordPress follows the heirarchy you mentioned… the UI is great and the code is an archaic mess from what I’ve seen, but it’s ubiquitus, fast and has caching plugins. Plus, with so much content you’re stuck with it unless you want a mountain of work.

    Bottom line is I’ll always keep coming back, but you’ve already got me hooked. The goal is to convert casual and first-time readers and make them aware of the scope of what you write about.

  57. TheAmazingTGIF says:

    Holy crap. I just clicked on the spoiler warning button on your homepage thing and that is my new favorite button. As an archive diver myself, it makes it so much easier to have quick access to the older seasons and all of their episodes in the proper order in one place.
    Good change, I like it!

  58. Sean Hagen says:

    Just wanted to chip in with my two cents ( after skimming the comments ).

    As far as making the interface work in multiple formats ( desktop, phones, tablets, print, screen-reader ), that’s what CSS ( more accurately, the CSS3 media selector or a JS library built to provide that functionality to older browsers ) is for. It takes a bit more work, but it is definitely worth it; your mobile-device using users will thank you quite a bit — I know I would.

    This is where I think the 600==”magic number” thing could be smoothed out. If you’re really considering mobile ( phone and/or tablet ) users in this update, I’d really recommend creating some stylesheets specifically for them. Maybe on mobile devices they don’t see the sidebar, or it’s moved to the top with less content ( some content, like the other site links, the RSS links, archives, and categories could be moved to the bottom instead ). I’d definitely recommend removing as much non-text content for mobile users, and that includes custom fonts, as many images as possible, the donate button, and probably the ads, as well.

    Now, before I get mauled for the donate button and ads bit, let me explain.

    First, ads. On a mobile device, unless a user is connected to wifi ( which you can not assume they are ) most smart readers will be keeping an eye on how much stuff is loading on a webpage. Especially ones with bandwidth caps. I’d suggest possibly moving to something more mobile friendly, such as text-only ads if your ad provider supports that. Or maybe your ad provider is smart enough to provide mobile-friendly ads automatically. Actually, just checked, the ads don’t load at all on my phone, so you can just ignore all of this, most likely.

    Next, the donate button. Clicking that on my phone leads to a very, very, very mobile-unfriendly PayPal site. My fingers start to hurt just looking at all the forms. Basically, I have the feeling that even if a mobile user wanted to donate money, they’d probably take one look at the PayPal site that’s offered to them and decide it’s not worth their time and go on to doing other things when they could have just continued reading the site. Alternatively, you can always leave the button, but I’d suggest switching to a text link ( if possible ), and putting it at the end of the post, just before the comments.

    Basically, the mobile version should have just enough styling for users to associate it with the desktop version of your site, but should be a parred-down and slimmer version of your site. As few images as possible, preferably as close to zero as you can get ( post images are exempt from this, of course ). The slimmer the better, because on mobile devices your goal should be as small a memory footprint as possible. Smaller footprints == faster loads == more frequent browsing of your site on mobile devices. People will come back to browse your site on a phone or tablet if they know the site will load fast and look nice.

    On a more general design note: when in doubt, steal. It’s something I’ve heard time and time again from designers I’ve worked with in the past ( I’m a web developer ). Go find sites that you like — even if they aren’t in the same niche as you — and copy the design elements that you think will help you meet your design goals. I’d definitely recommend looking at other sites on a phone and/or tablet to see how they handle mobile users, if mobile users get handled at all.

    1. ENC says:

      I agree with all of the above except one thing; the donate button at the end of a post.

      That would seem too forceful; I’d leave it where it is as thats’ where most sites have it, in an out of the way place (for Shamus’s site anyway; if I ever want to look at an archived post I’ll search for it and wade through all the in between posts as it takes me 5 minutes to find 1 thing I’m specifically looking for). He already plugs his books a lot (fairly) which isn’t pushy at all (everyone does it, a lot of people don’t know he has a book which makes him look immensely more professional even though he’s been writing professionally for years).

      On my mobile Shamus’s site also loads actually pretty fast compared to others for me, the only problem is I always go to shamusyoung.com first not twentysidedtale, which can be a pain.

      Speaking of which, it’d be nice if the intro page actually had The Witch Watch on it. You could also update it at the same time to include something like a guest appearances page (you have made) and a journalism (for the escapist) page.

      Then again, there’s a spelling mistake under the Spoiler Warning caption that’s been there for who knows how long.

  59. TMTVL says:

    My PS Vita likes the new version of the site as much as the old version. So at the very least you managed not to break the site. Good job.

  60. The Nick says:

    Maybe an ABOUT link at the top?

  61. Aldowyn says:

    You updated the best posts post, but I don’t see project hex or project frontier.

    Shucks, you could just have a page devoted to just your programming projects, kinda like the Spoiler Warning page (which is awesome, by the way. I never finished most of them, and if I wanted to it’d be really easy to get back into them)

  62. Loonyyy says:

    I only just set up my firefox again, and I noticed you’ve got a great image appeal which comes up when adblock is enabled.

    This is a fantastic thing. I know you’re looking for suggestions, but I think you should be commended for alerting the user to the importance of ads to your site. My use of adblock is entirely a security based thing (Scriptjacked or something twice), so I’ve no problem turning it off on safe sites.

    It’s a great reminder.

  63. shrikezero says:

    I suppose I qualify as a “rabid fan”

    When I found this site it was wonky. Its still wonky. I like it wonky.

    But I’d rather you get all the “rabid fans” you deserve and I have to get used to a new, less wonky site.

    wonky wonky wonky

    I love that word.

  64. somebodys_kid says:

    Before the changes, I would have said, “This site is fine and I can navigate it easily”.
    But the changes are a genuine improvement. Well done.

  65. MikeShikle says:

    Right now it looks very plain to me, actually Less professional than before with the icons. If I showed up as a new user right now I would be put off by the plain font and monochrome deisng, its easy to read but also very Windows 98 o.O … I also wouldn’t know what a Spoiler Warning is. The first thirty seconds of browsing wouldn’t give me a hint towards the Wealth of content you’ve made over the years, unless I stumbled across the categories tab, at least the icons gave the very clear message: “This person has created Tons of content!”

    What you want is to immediately draw attention to the amount of content and the most popular content. I’d say a drop down, header bar navigation menu like Rooster Teeth or Escapist have would be perfect. With tabs for “Best Posts, Webcomics, Videos, Books, Minecraft Server, Game Design, Columns, About”

    So when you would scroll down the Videos drop down menu you would get links to separate SW, Reset Button, etc. pages. Its a lot of work to re-organise every thing into its own category and with the amount of content you’ve made you’re looking at at least 10 drop down menus and dozens of categories but its the only way I can think of improving the site’s already decent navigation and its kind of amateur-ish first impression. Or just bring back the icons “shrug” =P

    Edit: A footer that gives more content once the person has stopped reading what they were reading is also a great way to get people to stay longer, but that’s up to you!

  66. Pickly says:

    Random twitter related question:

    Has twitter changed how conversations work recently? (I’m talking about the “something” “@Pickly actually something else”, “@Ylkcip that makes sense”, etc.) I’ve noticed that just clicking the tweet to show the full conversation doesn’t seem to work currently. (Sometimes I click and it just expands the post with no conversation, sometimes it shows abit of conversation in a new screen.) (I don’t have an account, this is just from watching people’s open accounts.)

    1. X2Eliah says:

      It’s always been touch and go for me, sometimes it opens stuff, sometimes not, sometimes only partly..

  67. TMTVL says:

    Revisiting the older seasons of Spoiler Warning, I noticed that the silly Twitter logo gets on top the bottom right of the video. I haven’t noticed it cutting off any subtitles, but you might still be wary of the possibility.

  68. TehShrike says:

    Just wanted to come by and comment as an oft-misunderstood “RSS feed reader” reader. :-)

    I generally only follow blogs that leave full content in their feeds. I follow too many sources to click through, even for good content. If you’re not Penny Arcade, I won’t subscribe to your feed if it doesn’t contain full posts.

    But that’s a side rant – Shamus already shares full feeds, and I appreciate that. I actually came to comment because he neglected to note another way that I interact with the site – by sending people links to posts.

    I send my friends links to posts from my RSS feed all the time. I have a dozen chat windows open at any given point during the day, and when I run into quality content that I think the denizens of a particular chat room would enjoy, I post it there for their enjoyment.

    I would posit that heavy feed readers are more likely to be towards the top of the viral sharing tree (top as in, closer to the head node, of course).

    And before I go, I’ll note that I still click through to comment when I have something to say – though that’s been less frequent this last year, as the comments are often on their second page by the time I click through on many posts.

  69. Lord_Bryon says:

    I am normally one of those invisible RRS. Given the number of blogs/comics that I follow, I find its a great time saver to know when a feed has been updated rather than having to individually check each site. Now I’ve noticed that some feeds just provide a link back to their content opposed to the content itself. I find this works quite well as I easily find out when they’re updates and the site owner gets the clicks and views. So my recommendation is tweak the way your RRS works.

    1. TehShrike says:

      That is how his feed currently works – every entry in his RSS feeds already links back to the correct page properly.

      It’s just that in addition, you could read the content in your feed reader if you wanted to – which I appreciate.

  70. 2tm says:

    Not ALL of your RSS Readers are Ninjas! I’ve been reading your blog via RSS for three years and I’m on your site all the time! I’ll admit, I don’t comment way to often, nor did I know you had an actual front page with the Twitter feed on it, but I’m in here to read comments on interesting posts and to donate occasionally. So….maybe I’m just a really shitty Ninja that missed all of the “stealth” classes?

  71. Alec W says:

    Let me just weigh in here.

    Your website is not very attractive.

    But god damn it if it doesn’t *WORK*.

    I can get to content, I can browse easily, and nothing gets in the way*

    Please don’t redesign at the cost of usability and accessibility like, oh, EVERY OTHER WEBSITE I HAVE EVER USED ON A REGULAR BASIS. Even Penny Arcade’s minor layout tweaks actually managed to make it worse, without fixing issues that had plagued it since the beginning.

    *The site is basically fine. The only things wrong with shamusyoung.com are:

    1) The literally retarded search function, which should be in a special school where it can’t hurt anyone, as it means well and feels like its trying so hard I want to be nice to it…but just ends up making me lose my temper and beat it up. The emergency ward is starting to ask probing questions. I am not sure if it’s just bringing up every article with a keyword I typed, but I’m certain I’ve got results that have no reference at all to what I typed. Maybe add in a weighting system so articles with the keyword I searched for in the title or first line appear higher in results? I have way more success with google (and doing that is far from perfect) than with your search.

    2) You may have had negative feedback about the complex sub-categories, but, all that really annoys people is they can’t navigate them quickly. They serve an end in giving a piece of content context and serving the different purposes this site seems to have. But the fact that all your subcategories don’t appear on the bar on the right makes them obscure and mysterious to the new user. Why is there no icon for ‘rants’ or ‘game reviews’ or ‘personal’?

    3) If you want to address all the issues, the tags at the bottom should include game titles as well as categories. This would fix an issue where I read your “Human Revolution: First Impressions” and have no idea where the rest of the content about that game was. At the bottom of that piece would appear “Tagged: Human Revolution”. The Spoiler Warning on DE:HR just has a tag “Spoiler Warning”!

    That’s all that’s wrong! Both of these – particularly 2) and 3), seem trivial to fix.

    Otherwise, keep up the good work. And do more Experienced Points + DRM rants. More consumers wake up to the bullshit every day, and they need champions with decent writing skills.

  72. Even says:

    Wasn’t sure where to post this, but I got an error message on Firefox when trying to post my last comment in http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=18858#comments

    After clicking “Post Comment”, the page tried to load for a good while, then failed to load altogether and then ended up at this adress

    http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/wp-comments-post.php

    with the following error message:

    Fatal error: Maximum execution time of 30 seconds exceeded in /home/shamusyo/public_html/twentysidedtale/wp-includes/option.php on line 88

    Don’t know if it means anything specific, but maybe it helps. I’m running NoScript with Facebook.net and GoogleSyndication.com filtered out from the site if that makes any difference. Site cookies at least didn’t update properly, since when writing this it didn’t fill in the name and E-mail fields automatically.

    1. Even says:

      Not sure if this still serves any purpose, but this is now the third time I get an error message in the same manner after posting. This time:

      Fatal error: Maximum execution time of 30 seconds exceeded in /home/shamusyo/public_html/twentysidedtale/wp-includes/functions.php on line 2427

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