Story archive usability questions: always fun!
Random question in re: story archive design for single-author archives. Um, which is a fancy way of saying "hey, that web site where I sling up all my stories".
With 74 stories to list, the index page begins to be long, and even the series list is long. Is this length still manageable? Do you want serieses broken out onto their own pages, or is keeping them on the index page with all the info in one place better? Do you browse for things you haven't read or instead want to zero in on a specific story?
If you wanted to, say, find all of my Giles/Jenny stories, how would you do so? Is it obvious or not?
I realize you're a bit of a skewed audience, since if you're commenting on this post you're more likely to be a regular reader. The experience of somebody who drops in and wants to find something interesting to read is different.
I need to find a new way to display information in the story header sections. It's absurd to have things like "Date:" there when that's self-explanatory. Some day, some day I will have a reasonable archive design! I have next week off, and I think one thing I'm going to do is write the web app portion of this project. Or at least start it. Right now you don't want to know what I do to inject new stories into the database. (Okay, it's not as bad as it might be: I edit yaml by hand.)
With 74 stories to list, the index page begins to be long, and even the series list is long. Is this length still manageable? Do you want serieses broken out onto their own pages, or is keeping them on the index page with all the info in one place better? Do you browse for things you haven't read or instead want to zero in on a specific story?
If you wanted to, say, find all of my Giles/Jenny stories, how would you do so? Is it obvious or not?
I realize you're a bit of a skewed audience, since if you're commenting on this post you're more likely to be a regular reader. The experience of somebody who drops in and wants to find something interesting to read is different.
I need to find a new way to display information in the story header sections. It's absurd to have things like "Date:" there when that's self-explanatory. Some day, some day I will have a reasonable archive design! I have next week off, and I think one thing I'm going to do is write the web app portion of this project. Or at least start it. Right now you don't want to know what I do to inject new stories into the database. (Okay, it's not as bad as it might be: I edit yaml by hand.)
I'm also leaning toward series summary info on the index, and detailed story listings on individual series pages. But a real index page, with everything listed in detail, might be useful too. Might just have both, and design a truly index-y index.
Basically, I want to come to a site, find what I'm looking for by category, and then have no weird background distracting me while I'm trying to read.
I think that the horizontal list of stories that you have in brackets above the vertical list of the actual stories seems superfluous. The titles there are distracting and unnecessary, cause you have the stories just below. And, although I find your image on the left hand side of the page really nice on your lj page, I don't prefer it on your website. I'm not sure why. Maybe it's a right handed/left handed issue? I have no idea why that could have any bearing on it. Prolly just a personal quirk, and not something anyone else would even notice.
And, I realize I am completely rambling again, so I'll just stop now. I give this kind of crap way too much thought. Thank goodness I'm completely computer illiterate, or I'd be redesigning my journal page constantly.
I do think your pairing index & tags index are both very easy to find and use, and do what it is that most people want - to find the stories they want to read.
And as much as I adore story headers for the information they tell us, they are kind of evil too. I have faith though, someday you're going to come up with something that revolutionizes it all!
The header material falls into two rough categories:
- discovery
- afterword
Items like pairing, warnings (aka advertisements), tags, summary, rating, and so on are tools the reader uses when deciding if she wants to read a story. Once the decision has been made ("yes, I want to read a teen-rated post-series story about a Giles/Spike romance"), they're irrelevant. The story text is what matters. So that material belongs in indexes, pages where the reader is browsing looking for something tasty.
That leaves notes, acknowledgments, awards and so on. These belong with the story, but are less important than the story. They should follow it as footer material, not header material, in a single-author archive.
How's that sound?
(oh, and thanks for pimping SOG on GilesNaughty, btw)
I LOVE the cloud for pairings, makes finding what you want really easy. As for the fandom page, I agree with whoever said it was hard to follow.
I think it would be much easier to follow if there was a simply link to the fandoms, then a link to the series and then have summaries and links to the different stories in the series. /two cents.
Oh, and the whole right side/left side issue I had earlier has disappeared now that the page is less cluttered.
Am I driving you crazy? Would you like me to stop?
If you feel adventurous, here's the source.