Web

Throw away, what distracts

trash

My pages are too full, my pre­ferred read­er says: She con­stant­ly gets some­thing to click on anoth­er arti­cle. She under­stands why. I want­ed to entice her to read on. Like a real news por­tal. But my con­tent was not broad enough. I only want to talk about a few core top­ics. So, kill your dar­lings — throw away, what dis­tracts — too much is just too much.

If she wants to read on, one list of options would be enough. That’s it. And if she is inter­est­ed in a core top­ic, she wants to get all posts about it at a click. Full stop. In oth­er words, she wants to get a lean page with at least dis­creet hints to oth­er pages.

[ en | de ]

Solution

  • In the sidebar wid­get, delete the Recent Post List, the tag cloud, and the cat­e­gories cloud.e
  • Delete the plu­g­in Recent Posts Widget Extended.
  • Go to Appearance/Menu and
    • Select your foot­er menu and delete it.
    • Orga­nize your main menu so that your main cat­e­gories appear on the top lev­el.
    • Add a Cus­tom Link with a list sym­bol + text below each cat­e­go­ry, which you let point to https://fodina.de/category/your-top-category-x.
    • Add an icon for ‘overview’ at the end of your main menu on the top lev­el.
    • Add a Cus­tom Link with a list icon under this qua­si-cat­e­go­ry, which you let point to https://fodina.de/myplp.
    • Also add a Cus­tom Link with a sitemap sym­bol under this qua­si-cat­e­go­ry, which you let point to https://fodina.de/sitemap.

Background

You might ask your­self why I throw so much away, although I put so much effort into adding all this dur­ing the last weeks. Could­n’t I have thought about that before? I could have! But I don’t work that way. I pre­fer to take a prac­ti­cal look at how it works and clean up after­ward. Glad­ly also after help­ful hints. The most impor­tant phase in writ­ing is also the one in web­site design, name­ly, the Kill Your Dar­lings phase:

  • Why do we need a foot­er menu that only leads back to the main cat­e­gories? To make scrolling eas­i­er for our read­er? The main menu is always vis­i­ble at the top of bootScore any­way. So away with the foot­er menu!
  • And why do we need the recent post list in our side­bar? Our overview page presents our posts in descend­ing order any­way. The lat­est posts are the first to be men­tioned there. And our read­er want­ed to have few­er ‘see-here-again’ incen­tives. So away with the Recent Post list!
  • If we don’t have a Recent Post list, we don’t need a plu­g­in to beau­ti­fy it. So also away with that!
  • Why do we need a tag cloud in the side­bar on each page? Our read­er just wants to have a search page. With every­thing that is need­ed. A tag cloud would make sense on that page. But not every­where. So away with the gen­er­al tag cloud.
  • And why do we need a cat­e­go­ry cloud? We can struc­ture our menu accord­ing to it. So away with the cat­e­go­ry cloud!

Now we just have to tell our read­er that there is — as request­ed — the one and only search page. To do so, we add an overview cat­e­go­ry in the menu, under which we link to our search page myplp.((myplp stands for My Post List Page and calls our list page home.php as a menu entry)). And for the sake of sim­plic­i­ty, we can also link to our sitemap right here. That’s good for our SEO.

But we could make our read­er’s life even eas­i­er. By adding a fan­cy ‘more’ but­ton in the side­bar, which sim­ply leads to our overview page, myplp. How­ev­er, this would then also appear in the side­bar of the myplp page itself, which would be non­sense. So we need dif­fer­ent side­bars for dif­fer­ent pages. We’ll tack­le that next.


And how does this …

… sup­port our migra­tion to bootScore? Well, when the web design­er has com­plet­ed her work on good illus­tra­tions, she can relax and inte­grate tags and clouds into her site, improve her overview page and design her own land­ing page. Whether the result­ing full­ness real­ly ben­e­fits her own read­er, whether it can become slim­mer and how, whether more dis­creet ref­er­ences and spe­cif­ic fonts also increase the read­abil­i­ty, all this she should nev­er­the­less con­sid­er while imple­ment­ing these fea­tures. This post sup­ports these steps towards a per­son­al­ized bootScore site.


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