Revision: Removing Complexity
This is the first in a series of articles documenting the redesign process that resulted in “Revision”, the name designated for the design of this site.
WordPress is an incredibly powerful content management tool. The amount of features seamlessly included in the software is impressive, but the users ability to manipulate those features at will is what makes the package appealing to me.
The previous design used for Back and Forth was the Say It theme. As I have mentioned before, that particular design was built to be distributed to the average blogger for use on their site and, as such, a lot of things needed to be taken into account. Every feature must be available to be included in the presentation and styled accordingly in order to satisfy the requirements of a wide range of customers.
When I decided it was time (or, more accurately, when proper time and motivation presented itself) to create a new design for this blog, I was able to focus on creating a layout that very specifically suited my needs and more importantly the needs of my readers. The objective for users of this site is simple: read the articles. So, and this may be over-simplifying, anything that adds complexity to that task should be removed.
So, what didn’t make the cut?
Categories or tags, why do we need both? Effectively and functionally these are the same. They are both a way of categorizing and cross referencing posts by subjects or keywords. I chose to use categories but it’s really irrelevant. Were I to change the title in the footer from “Categories” to “Tags” the experience remains the same (and, in fact, in the individual I use a little tag icon next to the categories).
Search. It is easy to understand the value of search on a site that contains a wealth of information on a specific subject. For example on a car blog you might want to look for a specific car review or one geared toward design a user might search for a specific technique.
The disparity of content, and likewise the readers, of my blog effectively negates the usefulness of search and that is proven with analytics data. Something like 1 in 1000 visitors hit the search page when it was accessible.
The truth of it is, a lot of my traffic is generated from various search engines with users looking for very specific content. Given that my interests are broad, it’s entirely possible posts with similar topics might have a large time span between them. For better or worse this means the average reader may find little useful on my site beyond the initial post they arrived here for.
Archive links saw little traffic in the past. This is logical. Why would anyone want to sort content on my site by date? What benefit does time add to my articles? On a news site, time might be beneficial in providing insight on events happening in proximity. On this site it was an added layer of navigation and an added layer of unnecessary complexity.
Meta information provides no value added to users. Links to log in to the admin panel, RSS feeds, and whatever else are just more stuff to get in the way of the main goal.
Complexity in the actual articles has also been removed. This is more of a design aspect but it’s worth noting here. When you start reading the article there is nothing between the first letter in the title and the last letter of the body besides the content of the post. Diversions have been moved aside to clean up the experience of consuming the site’s content.
