Monday 16 March 2009

Almost there - work project: Posh Pages

So after getting a little pertinent and constructive feedback from one user, and having a good secondary look at the first beta layout, I've tweaked PeterboroughToday.co.uk's Posh landing page layout.

  • Tightened up the Posh content header vertically and shrunk heading graphic as it's already under a template header and navigation structure.
  • Simplified the navigation options, took out extraneous copy on the header to encourage users to dive straight into page content.
  • Re-organised the content layout on the landing page to give a quick snapshot of latest Posh events whilst keeping as much 'above the fold' as possible, but without overloading the eye - a tough balancing act with only 815pixels in width.
  • Shortened visible league table so as to draw user into full table which has sortable columns via jquery, plus an extra page view!
  • Added club information box, an obvious initial oversight.
  • Highlighted RSS feed/email alerts using Feedburner.
  • Hoping to bring in CoverItLive element in the future.

Posh Pages: home

Thursday 12 March 2009

Twitpic bug shows the downside of trusting social software

After reading about BBC's Rory Cellan-Jones's worrying incident after a Twitpic bug swapped an innocuous image for a rather less family-friendly one, it acutely shows the problem with all the myriad of social software, free tools and applications that become an integral part of our lives, and are even used regularly for work purposes.

You have to trust that the people behind it can keep the tool going and the service reliable in order to honour the faith and trust put in by signing up.

Twitter has become a valuable tool for news producers: at my paper we have a Twitter feed that also powers our facebook status, and if that became buggy like in Rory's experience or stopped working it would impact on our audiences perception of us as a publisher as well as the tool in question.