For those of you who were on twitter this morning, Ed Yong had some
thoughts on the LS layout. I asked him to expand, and he sent me an email. Here it is!
"The way I see it, on your site, you have the blogs, which provides unique, original and interesting content, written by an impressive collection of people. You also have “news” (and I use the term charitably), which amounts to nothing above what you could achieve by plugging the Eurekalert RSS feed into a blog. In terms of which of these should take pride of place on your main page, I personally think it’s a no-brainer."
I have to say I agree. We've now got a pretty large and extremely strong team of writers, and people are going to come to LS for the blogs, not for the news headlines they could get anywhere.
Here's some more random spewage of thoughts:
Re: "best rated" - how well is the rating system working? Are people actually voting on blog posts? I have a couple that have been rated, but only 1-3 actual votes per post. Also--and this may just be me--but I initially found the "rate this blog" to be confusing, because to me, a "blog" is the entire collection of posts by a single person, not an individual entry. Obviously,
we know what the rating system does here and can go nuts voting on each other's posts to generate the Featured posts, but I wonder if for the masses, "most viewed" and "most commented" will be enough to push the popular posts to the front.
I like the idea of having a "recent posts" column and a "all the bloggers" column. I think that in "recent posts" you should probably not put our bios there--it looks a little silly, for example, to have 3 Genomic Repairman bios right in a row. I do think bios should go in the "all bloggers" column, though.
I'm going to work on a mock-layout today, because I'm losing my job in 2 months and am too depressed to think about real life stuff.
0