Sex offenders web site - Customizing Your Blog s Layout CHAPTER 1 7
Customizing Your Blog s Layout CHAPTER 1 7 In this chapter, I will show you how to improve your users experience by tailoring your blog s layout to your audience. As with the previous chapters, the focus is on building your community and making it enjoyable and rewarding for people, so they will return again and again. To achieve this goal, you need to think about the users experience as they use your site. What are your readers doing on the site? What are they trying to achieve? When you have the answers to these questions, you can help your readers by customizing your site to accommodate their interests. Considering What Your Reader Is Doing When users click the comments link of a story, they are taken to a new page where they are presented with the story in full and the related conversation. Almost everything else they see looks the same as the layout on the front page. That s the beauty of a template-driven system. You don t need to do anything to get the same look and feel, as well as common content across all your pages. But sometimes presenting the same layout is not the right thing to do. You should think about what the users are doing. What are their intentions? What benefit will they get from this action? What will they want to do next? The answers to these questions depend somewhat on the nature of your site. Having a Conversation People love to chat. They love to have their say. In pubs and clubs, in their homes, in bus queues, and in supermarket aisles, people love to talk. For many people, it is just as rewarding to have those conversations without the face-toface contact, such as on the phone or on a shortwave radio. People still have conversations with pen and paper, sending letters to each other. Similarly, people love to have conversations online. The nature of some online conversations is analogous to other types of conversations. Real-time chat in a chat room is most like a face-to-face meeting with several people. Instant messaging is like a phone conversation between two people. E-mail is like a paper-and-pen correspondence. Yet the online world gives us other ways to converse that don t have true parallels in the real world. That e-mail conversation can take place on a mailing list, where many people join in. Bulletin boards are like conversations with a lot of people, but the conversation can be in near real-time, like a chat, or time-delayed over many hours, days, or weeks, more like a mailing list.
In case you need affordable webhost to host your website, our recommendation is ecommerce web host services.