Comments Now Open
May 14, 2004 at 8:22 AM
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The look is not the only thing that's new—comment functionality has been added so that readers can post thoughts on articles we publish and items posted in our What's New blog. The web has been built by those willing to share their thoughts and ideas—share yours with us and the readers of Digital Web Magazine.
Comments
Also, please feel free to make suggestions about the commenting system. I have included a series of basic HTML that is allowed, let me know if you'd like to see other tags added.
Well Done! The new look is much cleaner.
One terrible flaw that I am finding with this commenting system is that it doesn't support previews. While your CMS software may not allow for such behavior, you might want to look into Jon Hicks' Live Comment Previews. His solution seems to work well across the variety of browsers that I've attempted to use it on. Lack of comment preview often causes followup "oops" comments that clutter the comment space. I consider preview to be an essential comment feature.
We actually use our own CMS here.. so ya, we can add preview.. we'll put it on the list.
Ok, testing the preview now. This may be a weak example.
I actually liked the old one before. Things are moved around a ton, and atleast, for me, its a bit harder to find things. I also liked the black. This isn't too bad, but I think its a step down.
Well Meg, I have to say I'm delighted to see the heavy black of the original as a thing of the past. Also well done on delivering so much as a result of the survey. Off to test the preview :) Yikes, sure hits you between the eyes :)
Yup, but it works... helps avoid dup posts too. As for the survey being the driver for the design, yes, that is true very much so... in fact, the past 3 annual surveys have helped drive the design. Not to mention a great group of advisors and also a Digital Web Mag readership focus group... and lastly, the beta testers (though only a handful and a lot more informal that I had hoped). The other major factor was user feedback. Everytime someone used that little web form and asked for us to add some feature, change something, or consider something... we kept the email and used it to help make redesign decisions... well, that and log file data. As far as Meg's comments... I agree with John, I am glad to see it gone... it was a very '90s-centric design. It was time to move on.
You guys sure do act quickly around here. :) The preview looks great!
I find the site very much improved in terms making things findable. The organization of articles alone -- by author, title, topic, type -- is such a huge improvement. You know, I can't even remember very well now how one found articles by topic in the past. It seemed so much like an online analog of a print magazine as I remember. But having different types of indexes makes it easy for people to go back and find articles within a topical area of interest without having to poke back linearly or use search. I find it essential to do this with a collection of articles. Very well done.
