Footnotes on the footer
In my previous post about the redesign, I glossed over what was actually was a fair amount of thought and logic behind what I did (and re-did). Based on the comments, some of that thinking might not be clear.
Why not just stick them on their own page? If you want archives, click on archives, and go to the archives. Seems unnecessary to hang them on the bottom of every page whether they’re wanted or needed for that visit, or no.
All that stuff at the bottom of the page seems overkill and excessive server to client material.
So here’s my rationale. (Beware, this is all very information-design-y, and may make your eyes glaze over. Caveat lector.)
If you read the site frequently, you’ll never see the footer anyway.
Since I only post every two or three days, only the top article will be new to most readers. You’d stop scrolling once you hit an article you’d already read.
So the footer isn’t overkill if you never see it.
Many of my visitors come via search engines.
Looking through the logs, it’s clear that a significant percentage of traffic on the site ends up here because of a screenwriting-related search. If a visitor lands on an article about what I/E means, he’d likely have no sense of what else was available on the site. To reverse a metaphor, he’d only see the tree, not the forest.
Yes he could click on a link for an Archives page, but I wouldn’t. By sticking the footer on every page of the site, I can help anyone landing on any page get a sense of how much is available.
It increases the stickiness.
“Stickiness” is an awkward term to describe how much time a person spends at a given website, which helps determine ad rates. This site doesn’t have any ads, but it does have a lot of information I’d like people to have. So, unlike my house, I’m happy to have people hang around for a while.
An Archives page means another layer of clicking.
Let’s say you want to find an entry about Big Fish. With the fat footer, you click on “Big Fish,” and you get a list of all the articles in that category. Pick your article and read it.
With an Archives page, you’d first get a list of categories, then a new page with the entries. That’s not complicated, but it’s an extra step, and an extra kind of page to keep straight. (That is, a main Archives page, and a Category page.)
For the same reason, I’ve chosen to have the Archives page list all the articles in a chosen category, rather than breaking it down into chunks of 10 or 20 articles. The smaller chunks look nicer, but are ultimately harder to mentally process. (Was that other article I was interested in on page 2 or 3 of the results?)
Yes, there are slick AJAX-y ways of doing all the category stuff on a single page. However, a lot of these solutions reset every time you come back to the page, which makes churning through a bunch of articles frustrating.
It’s not that much more work for the server.
The server is off-site, so I can’t give any quantitative figure. But in testing, I haven’t seen any difference in page-loading times with or without the fat footer. Generating the archive list for the footer is exactly one line of php:
< ?php wp_list_cats('sort_column=name&optioncount=1&hierarchical=1'); ?>
If generating the footer were slowing things down, it would be (almost) trivial to cache it. But I don’t see that being a factor.
Still, the footer means extra information to deliver to the client. That’s one reason I’ve dropped the default number of articles per page, and why I’m pretty conscientious about keeping images reasonably-sized.
Does the site sometimes load slowly? Yes. And too often, it goes down altogether. It’s a hosting situation that I hope to have resolved in the near future.
The archives listing helps search engines index the site.
This is debatable, honestly. True, it puts every article in the site just two links away, making it easier to spider through the site. In the old days of search engine optimization, this was a major goal. Now it’s probably much less important, because there are now many different ways for the Googles of the world to find, process and deliver the information on the site.
I mentioned before that this is part one of the redesign. The second phase will occur this week, and will make it more clear why I changed some of the things I did.
Articles
February 6th, 2006 at 8:53 pm
I read your blog through the feed so I popped over to see what you’re talking about. Spiffy! I’m enjoying the footer. Very organized. I’m looking forward to phase two.
You sound like you’re having fun.
Gia
February 6th, 2006 at 9:21 pm
The redesign, so far, works for me. As suspected, I had never been to the Archives section of the site. But the category listings at the bottom of the page caught my eye and I spent a couple of hours reading nearly all the “Writing Process” entries. I doubt I would have otherwise done that as when I see Archives, I expect an unsorted mess of stuff and usually don’t bother. (Great stuff, by the way, everyone should take a gander down there.)
As for functionality, I firmly believe one click is almost always better than two. If you don’t have to sacrifice clarity, then one click is the superior choice. Also, for the record, my page load time has not been affected.
So, redesign away…
February 7th, 2006 at 12:41 am
God, I love it when an accomplished screenwriter can drop knowledge on PHP and information design. Three cheers for intellectual diversity!
(from a fellow screenwriter/PHP guru)
February 7th, 2006 at 2:30 am
Hey, have you ever thought of becoming a web designer? I hear they can make some pretty good money.
Well, something to fall back on, if this whole screenwriter thing falls through.
Like the new footer, I didn’t realise you had such an easy to browse database of valuable experience. Now I do. So I’m gonna use it.
February 7th, 2006 at 5:24 am
I have been reading your page for some time and I enjoyed the new design. I found lots of interesting information that I hadn’t noticed before thanks to this new structure. That’s what you wanted, right? I only miss the links to other pages and blogs at the right side and the light grey numbers at “Archives by Cathegory� are not exactly easy to read given the dark blue background. Anyway, designs and redesigns apart, congratulations on the amazing job you’ve been doing here!
February 7th, 2006 at 5:52 am
I have to admit it’s much easier to find… anything, but it feels kinda wrong. Maybe we’re not used to it yet.
February 7th, 2006 at 7:22 am
John, don’t ping me for bringing this up again (or do — your site!), but I’m still finding it difficult to read the dark grey article-count text to the right of item titles in ‘Articles by Category’. (Anyone else having the same trouble?)
The grey there is way darker than the grey text used in the dates to the left of the ‘Recently’ items.
Could you maybe change the article-count to be the same grey colour as the date text? That would lighten in enough for these tired old eyes, I’m sure.
Hang on — I’ll try this page in IE instead of my beloved Firefox, to see if it’s a browser thing…
Nope, same dark grey for article count.
Anyway, no more nitpicking from me. IMHO the footer is just fine and dandy.
February 7th, 2006 at 8:55 am
I like the new background. Gets me psyched for mid spring hiking!
Since I’m usually procastrinating when I take a tour through the ’sphere efficiency is not much of concern for me. Probably the opposite. But it looks slick and you enjoy the logistics behind it. Two good reasons.
Have fun, John! -S
February 7th, 2006 at 9:54 am
Andrew –
Done. (Force a reload if you’re still getting the dark gray.)
February 7th, 2006 at 10:33 am
Wow, John — you’re a complete pushover when it comes to notes… Kidding!
The lighter grey is perfect. Thanks!
Hmmm, now I can see that figure of 294 QandA. I’d better get reading.
February 7th, 2006 at 1:27 pm
I’ve made use of the footer already - I was writing an informal essay on a Zavattini article for my screenwriting course and thought something you said would be a valuable quotation. Hope you don’t mind.
February 7th, 2006 at 2:03 pm
I like the redesign. Just spent some time navigating through the archives, and found the process simple and efficient. And I don’t think that it’s a problem listing archive categories on the bottom of each page. Readers that are interested will use it, and those that aren’t just won’t scroll down that far on the page. Also, it’s nice having your off-topic links readily available. I tended to forget to go to that section when it was on its own page.
Overall, I think the entire redesign raises the bar for the rest of us using Wordpress. Now I have to roll up my sleeves and get busy with my own site redesign.
Glad you kept that mysterious hanging brad, though!
February 7th, 2006 at 2:43 pm
I usually read your articles via the RSS feed, but the footer encourages me to read your older articles that I may have missed. I find the catagory listing quite useful. Yes, I likes it.
February 8th, 2006 at 4:04 pm
I think it’s all good. I’m just glad the archives are easier to search now.
February 9th, 2006 at 12:29 am
John,
I love reading your stuff, so I thought I would take a minute to find - and supply you with - a reference I thought you might be interested in.
It is for another weblog, Joel on Software, that did a redesign for many of the same reasons you did. I like his left column better than your footer. It might just be a taste thing, but I don’t think so; I think it’s a usability thing. Maybe you need both, as they have slightly different purposes. It’s certainly convenient to have everything in one easy-to-find place.
Joel’s main site is: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/ The article discussing the rationale of his redesign is: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2005/10/30.html
Best of luck and thanks for your entertaining and informative writing.
February 9th, 2006 at 4:08 am
Kudos! The footer information is brilliant! I wish more blogs were designed like this!
February 9th, 2006 at 5:18 am
i get your blog on my rss feed and came over to see the change and really like it. for one, it simply pulls my eye to the text of the most recent post, which ultimately is what’s most important. i’m glad archives are more accessible.
on a completely unrelated note, i just read this article over at josh friedman’s blog, and though very humorous, i also found it incredibly troubling and frankly, frightening as hell. i would love to hear your take on it.
February 9th, 2006 at 10:24 am
I, too, like the addition of the footer. I think your design reasoning is sound — particularly that people in search of more would naturally scroll to the bottom of a page. Such a robust navigation in the footer, however useful, bucks the more typical “top, left, and/or right” navigation found on many sites, and there may be a portion of your audience that never wander far south enough to take advantage of it. Perhaps something “above the fold” could clue them in, such as an “Expanded Navigation” link (or something like that) included in the right menu bar that would drop to a target embedded in the footer?
Regardless, excellent addition!
February 9th, 2006 at 10:34 am
Great! The re-organization is the picture of clarity!
February 11th, 2006 at 7:54 pm
First and foremost, THANK YOU for putting the Go scripts online. They are an inspiration.
Now about those archives…
(I’m still using the default templates for my own site, but why should that stop me from commenting here?)
The footer looks great, but your posts get so many comments that I doubt most people would scroll far enough to find it. But, I really like that your design doesn’t have a lot of clutter on the sides of each page. The average web site makes me nauseous these days — there is just too much crap encircling each piece of content.
Maybe you could add a little bug at the bottom of all your posts that would take you to an anchor tag at the top of the archives section… but anchors can be confusing for a lot of users. Maybe you could put the entire archives section in an expand/collapse type thing… no, that would suck too.
I guess I can’t think of anything better.
If you think I’m constructive with blog comments, you should see me with construction paper.
February 15th, 2006 at 3:55 pm
Hi John,
Love the site, and the footer is a good idea.
Just a few comments. Aesthetically, I think your indented “projects” are not looking as nice as they could. Perhaps distinguish them as a subcategory by use of colour, font, size or some other means. Because you are running a two column list, the indent is making things look a little messy.
Also in IE 6.0.2 (I know, I hate it too!) the footer doesn’t quite fill the whole centre column of the page. Neither does your header (at ‘Normal’ text size). Ideally everyone should upgrade to Firefox, and that will happen about the time we broker peace in the middle-east. Until then, perhaps a few revisions to make it a little more cross-browser compatible?
Great site though, thanks for sharing the insider info with us plebs.