Angry in the Great White North

Angry in the Great White North has been revamped...yet again.  I just can't help myself.  I really enjoy tinkering with HTML and CSS.

But this redesign goes much deeper than mere tinkering.  I've been tracking visitor behaviour in a non-intrusive way, and what I've learned has gone into this layout.

If you recall, my previous home page included six panels showing extended excerpts of the six most recent stories.  I tried that approach because I wondered if some visitors were visiting my blog infrequently, with days between visits.  If so, they would come and see all the stories they would want to catch up on displayed on a single page.  Presumably those visitors would drill down to read, then come back to the home page, then drill down again, repeating until caught up on what was happening at the blog.

So I looked at the page views, and they stubbornly refused to move from an average of 2.4 or less.  That means the vast majority of visitors came to the blog, read one story, and left.  That would mean they would come as often as I was posting.  These visitors were solely interested in the latest story, and nothing else.  Or if they are interested in other stories, finding them ought to be easy.  Intra-post navigation has been restored, and the monthly and category archives have been dusted off and made more easily accessible.

Back to the overall site. I reduced my home page to highlight the latest story only.  But why stop simplifying there?  So I reviewed traffic to all my auxiliary pages, and decided to dump them all!

• Bio or About page:  Replaced with a simply "About the Author" blurb on the home page and on non-story pages.
• Donations page: A bold callout on each header.
• Quotations page:  Nice things famous people have said about me.  An exercise in vanity.  Out it goes.
• Contact page: Same as the Bio or About page.
• Blogrolls page: Blogrolls are a bit archaic.  Today we have sites like the Blogging Tories or the Liblogs that act as central hubs.  With that in mind, I'm providing links to those sites, from which visitors can find other political blogs of interest.

I also decided to go for a theme.  That would help me keep the design unified.  I went with a newspaper-like look.  Like most newspapers, there is little advertising on the front page.  Advertising has been relegated to the individual entry pages.  Right now, it's just Google Adsense.  This makes sense, anyway, since Adsense is context-sensitive, and the amount of context on the home page is minimal compared to an individual post entry.  I'll look at other revenue channels to share that space, like Blogads.  Advertising is now on either side of the story.  There is more advertising in total, but it's less intrusive (that is to say, out of the flow of the story).  It'll be interesting to see what happens to revenue.  In any case, advertising always undergoes adjustment.

In keeping with comments from several people, all fonts have been increased in size.  I hope that helps.

For people who get content without visiting the site, various subscription mechanisms are listed in the top left-hand corner of each page.  The most significant change here is the addition of Twitter.  Over the last few weeks, I've noticed a surge in Twitter subscriptions.  Every day, it seems, two or three or four more people subscribe to my Twitter feed, and I've not done anything to encourage it.  I'll be watching to see if providing a link to my Twitter feed changes the pace of subscriptions.

I hope you like the new design.  It was literally designed with you in mind.  Let me know if I'm way off in making the site more enjoyable for you.

How I did it?  In case you were wondering what toolset I used, really, it was simple stuff.  I designed the look-and-feel of the pages using Inkscape.  Graphical elements were tweaked using GIMP.  I used the free text editor PSPad to type up the CSS and HTML files.  I don't normally use a web page design tool but just hand-code the files using my Inkscape sketches as a reference as I fiddle with the placement of the elements.  I try very hard to ensure that every file validates using the W3C Markup Validation Service.  The validation tool is very useful for tracking down rogue DIVs while I'm developing.  Currently all the main files validate, as do recent individual entries.  I check that the pages load in what I think is a reasonable time using a free tool at WebSiteOptimization.com.  I check for cross-browser compatibility using BrowserShots.org.

What's next? Mobile-specific and printer-specific style sheets.