April 4, 2019 at 2:31 pm
I'm going to try it for another month or so, but expect I'll stop being a daily visitor/reader, and in future will only come here when I have a problem. I have never/will never visit this site from a mobile device, that's just not a thing I'd do. I have only large portrait-oriented displays at my desk, and the new mobile-oriented format just seems inefficient. I suspect I'd need to page thru several pages to view what I used to quickly scroll to and read on the main home page.
In general I never opt for m.someothersite.com from my desktop--the experience is inferior. But now here the "m." is implicit, there is no alternative. Same applies to the daily email I've been subscribing to.
I realize I'm in the minority here, do not expect you to change. And I have much respect for Steve and the team, just wanted to point out a differing view.
April 4, 2019 at 2:50 pm
Thanks, Mike, for the thoughts. Fair points, and I respect your view.
The mobile thing isn't about visiting on mobile, though we've had requests for years. They're likely a small number. The bigger issue is search rankings. Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc. are dramatically lowering rankings of sites that don't have a good mobile view, so that's the issue.
I'm curious, what is on the home page from the old site that isn't on this one? We moved most of the stuff, and while it's formatted differently, the data is roughly the same.
April 4, 2019 at 3:38 pm
I see. Maybe I'll grow into it, will give it a few weeks. Probably should have waited before posting. Maybe just put off by the white space? It feels mobile-ish. On old site I felt like I generally got everything I wanted on the home page or daily email. I didn't drop into any forums unless one of the selected posts caught my attention. Maybe you're still putting all that there now, just without forum headers? I don't know. The last few days I thought I needed to advance to subsequent pages to see everything...maybe that wasn't true?
April 4, 2019 at 5:22 pm
I would agree the mobile experience is not good, 50 percent of the screen is given up to white space so answering any question is impossible when the TSQL spreads over several pages! Responses from mobiles used to be frequent and accompanied with ''apologies have not tested it, as on mobile"!
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April 4, 2019 at 5:24 pm
NB the old site was readable on a mobile device!!!!
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April 4, 2019 at 7:34 pm
yeah I hate newer web site incarnations. This one isn't bad at all in particular though, but in general I'm not all into the new mobile first thing. At least this one doesn't seem to have that "infinite scroll" business which I hate with the fire of a thousand suns.
April 4, 2019 at 8:37 pm
I have to concur with Mike's original post. I don't like reading texts on my cell phone nevertheless browsing web pages.
I guess I was used to this site and navigated it easily. Now I just don't like it.
The forum questions on the email don't stand out like before, they blend into the background.
April 5, 2019 at 12:56 pm
Fair points. give it a week or two and post back. We'll push on with bug fixes and revisit some of the design elements in a few weeks
April 8, 2019 at 4:24 pm
I also concur with Mike Good's post. I have frequented the site in the past, mostly reading useful articles I saw in a newsletter. I would guess the audience reading this website is sitting at a desktop computer where they do their daily work, either reading a newsletter email before jumping into the days work, or searching for a solution to a problem. They probably aren't on their phone or tablet as much.
The old format (which was functional and simple) allowed you to quickly scan the newsletter for articles of interest, and then checkout the voice of the dba. You didn't need to do a lot of scrolling to see if anything was of interest. The new format almost forces you to read the entire contents of the email with no way to quick scan for items of interest.
The new website format relies completely on search. If I wanted to browse articles for a topic, there is no structure..only search. Which is ok...but not better than a structured and organized and edited presentation. The home page is giving me a list of over a thousand pages of articles? That's not really a homepage in my opinion. I guess it depends how people land on the site, probably first from a website search, then from the newsletter subscription. My guess is that your newsletter traffic will probably decrease, and most people will land on your page from a google search. If that was your goal, I think you hit it. If you want a community place with the newest edited content that draws data professionals to read and contribute, it is less appealing now.
April 8, 2019 at 5:02 pm
There is not a 1000 articles on the home page. I'm not sure what you saw, but there isn't 1,000. If you click on an Article, there is a category associated with it and we're working to get these back into the main article so that you can get a browseable list of topics.
However, that's really search. Search does allow you to get a list of items in an area, and we're working to make that more tailorable. I get the idea of browsing a topic, but that was limited in the old site as well. I do hope to get a breadcrumb like list of topics you can add/subtract to get results in an area.
Almost all our traffic comes from search. Almost all.
The newsletter gets some, and we do need some styling on the newsletter to let people see the TOC, other than that the format of the newsletter hasn't changed. We didn't anticipate that was highly used as we have no metrics, so that needs to be added back.
Any change we made was going to disrupt some people. What you miss is that we've had lots of complaints over the years about the old view that was hard to read. There isn't going to be a way to please everyone for now, but perhaps we can have a couple themes that people can choose from.
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