Designing the Blog, Chapter 4: Getting Functional
Previously: Introduction, 1, 2, 3
Now that we know roughly what the finished site is going to contain, we can start defining and refining some of the functionality that the site will employ.
To start with, let’s look at the core content – the blog entries. There are two pieces of functionality at play here; first, navigating the content; and second, interacting with it: commenting.
I’d like to give the user the greatest possible choice in how they choose to move around within the site, so to that end the blog navigation options will take many forms – a list of most recent entries, with the ability to choose how many to display; links to previous and next entries when browsing an individual entry; a calendar to provide visual cues as to when posts have been made; an archive page with all entries listed by date or category – most or all of these are pretty standard for a blog nowadays.
For commenting, I’d like to combine some of the current practices sweeping the blogosphere; live preview, author highlighting, cookie-triggered ‘self’ highlighting, conversation threading, that sort of thing. The other method of navigation not mentioned yet is searching. There will of course be a search box on every page, as all good sites should have, plus an Advanced Search facility.
The photo gallery will require its own piece of new functionality, assuming I don’t go for a plugin solution. I prefer the type of gallery with one photo for each ‘sub-gallery’ on the main gallery page, and then thumbnails which can be clicked to view larger versions within the sub-gallery (much like CollyLogic does it at the moment).
That’s about it for actual functionality of the site – I don’t think it’s realistic to start specifying the functions in too much detail at this point.
Next – Chapter 5: Information Architecture
Filed under: Designing the Blog.
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Next: NaNo Day One
Comments
- Stuart
- 2753 days ago
- If you go for Live Preview in comments what are you going to do about spamming? I did look at this along with Live Search just after Jon Hicks put up his latest design but haven’t gone with it as the current preview first method is a good blocker for auto-spammers. I note you go straight to submit here so I’m thinking you may have something in place already. Also what do you mean by advanced search? What have I missed? :grin:
- #1
- Matthew Pennell
- 2752 days ago
- I don’t really have a big problem with comment spam at the moment, even though I’ve done away with the Preview method (there is nothing in place to prevent spam at the moment, just me checking the comments every day).
I will probably use a blacklist with the Live Preview to block known spammers.
Advanced Search I’m thinking will reflect the sort of complicated queries you can construct within Google, with the ability to limit searches to certain areas, date limits, that sort of thing. - #2
