A slow failure

December 14, 2006 – 10:56 am

Ever since I decided to disable public commenting on Ejecutive nearly four months ago, I’ve been closely monitoring the traffic and regular readership. I’ve released a steady stream of improvements to Ejecutive since then, mainly Opacity2 and upping the professionalism of my writing, so you’d think that my readership should improve eh?

Well you’d be wrong.

Facing the facts

Things did start quite well, with an eight per-cent increase in visits in September compared to August, while the number of unique visitors remained the same. However October saw a 38 per-cent drop in visits compared to September, and 40 per-cent drop in unique visitors. Things got worse in November which saw a 21 per-cent drop in total visitors compared to October, but the number of unique visitors did remain the same.

If you look in the archives, it’s easy to see a big reason why this is happening, in September I wrote eight articles, all of which were in the first half of the month. Then there was a gap of over a month before my next article in the second half of October. In total there were only two articles in October. And again in November I only wrote three articles although at least they were spaced out evenly across the month.

Fixing Ejecutive

Thinking back, I don’t remember why I got such a boost in early September to write so much, but it obviously helped the success of the site hugely, especially seeing as one of my articles was heavily linked to and got submitted to Digg. But I know I have to get that drive back if I want stop the slide in readership after all the hard work I’ve put into Ejecutive to make it successful. So I’m going to try a little experiment, I’m going to post an article on Ejecutive at least five times a week. This means you’ll be getting ten times more love (articles), and I’m not just talking about links, these will be proper articles about anything I care about, not just technology, the web and politics, but also music, photography and cinema/movies/film.

I’m also going to add a more personal touch to this site, as you’ve probably noticed in my last article. I’ve asked for feedback, which as been 100 per-cent positive, so I’ll be sticking with it for the time being. With the standard blog format of Opacity2, I find some of my best articles are lost with time, and it’s increasingly hard to find them, I’ve got to figure out a way to feature them, and figure out some time to do it in.

I do have a cold at the moment, which probably means I’ll have it over the weekend too, so I may as well make the best of a bad situation and work on Ejecutive, making the site easier to navigate as a whole and bring more structure to the content. While I do love the minimalistic design of Oapcity2, maybe its turning my visitors away instead of inviting more in.

By weiran | Posted in Articles | Comments Off

Opacity Strikes Back

November 9, 2006 – 12:54 pm

Here it is, the new design for Ejecutive, which I’ve dubbed Opacity Strikes Back (or Opacity2).

Being a Minimalist, I was never completely happy with the original Opacity. The initial design was too complicated, and so when I tried to implement it, the complexity got out of hand, to the stage where the CSS alone was split into seven different files and totalled over 20KB.

I didn’t put enough thought into the whole design procedure, and in the end design aesthetics won over usability. Even though the design was eventually scaled back and improved, a dark blue background made text hard to read for all but the lucky few with high contrast monitors. I also choose to justify the text, without doing much research into why this would make the text harder to read.

The problem lies in the current trend of having fancy graphics, reflections and bold colours, when the real design issue is typography. Information Architects explains the problem well:

Information design is not about the use of good typefaces, it is about the use of good typography. Which is a huge difference. Anyone can use typefaces, some can choose good typefaces, but only few master typography.

I’m not saying I’ve mastered typography, but I can tell the difference between good typography, and bad typography. Opacity had bad typography, and I was a little ashamed to have designed and used it on my website.

Opacity2 is the expression of my Minimalistic ideals. Every superfluous feature has been striped out, and replaced by white space. In fact, you’ll notice that there is a lot of white space between almost everything. I’ve optimised and tweaked the line spacing, letter spacing and word spacing to create what I believe is currently the most usable typography I can muster out of Georgia. You may also notice there are lots of white space between posts and between paragraphs, and all the white space is relative to each other, so the space between posts is three times that of the space between paragraphs, and so on.

It’s about time us so-called “designers” starting educating ourselves about the real design, and face the fact that over 95% of the content you create will be text, so you number one priority when designing should be how to treat the text.

Going off on a tangent here, but this is also the first design and theme I’ve made using completely open source tools, not relying on Macromedia Dreamweaver or TextMate as I usually do1 but instead using the excellent Notepad2 by flo. Thumbs up for using the right tool for the job.

  1. Although I admit that if I had access to my Macbook during the time I spent designing Opacity2, I probably would’ve used TextMate instead. ↩
By weiran | Posted in Articles | Comments Off

Opacity: No more comments

September 1, 2006 – 2:37 pm

Comments for blog posts are as synonymous to blogs as the posts themselves. Nearly every blog has them, and every CMS worth its salt will cater for them. But recently I’ve started to wonder just how useful comments really are?

Comments encourage responses to the posts from readers, casual or regular (as long as there’s no authentication system used). However in the near three hundred posts this blog as had, and the four hundred comments that accompany them, I can only think of two situations where the comment system was really and truly used to its potential. Most of the time, comments don’t really add to a post, and don’t offer that much more insight other than the opinions of other people.

The biggest problem to a commenting system for a small blog such as mine, is that it makes it look small! Most readers of blogs judge the popularity, and sometimes even the quality of a blog through the volume of comments it receives. Ejecutive averages only just above one comment per post, and this is just not popular enough to warrant a commenting system.

On average, I receive under one hundred unique visitors per day (bar the rare traffic spike), and the majority of the comments are centralised on a few posts. So I’ve decided to take the rather unconventional measure of disabling comments on all posts as part of the second phase of the Opacity experiment, which you can already see happening.

This will be the last post with comments open to the public, and this will be closed in a few days. After that, if you want to contact me, I’ll make it painfully easy to on the contact page.

One very successful blog, in the form of Daring Fireball, doesn’t have comments, as it relies purely on the quality of it’s content, which is hopefully why people will start reading Ejecutive.

By Zoe Hughes | Posted in Articles | Comments (4)

Opacity: no flow

June 9, 2006 – 11:57 pm

The majority of blogs have a “river of posts” style on their front page, where the newest post is at the top and previous posts are below it in order of their date. I just never thought this worked well for the majority of visitor. If you’re a new visitor, you get presented with huge amount of information on one page that wouldn’t make much sense. If you’re a returning visitor, you get presented with a lot of repeat information that isn’t required. I mean, its not the end of the world, many successful blogs run that format, but I needed something else that worked better for me.

Ejecutive only posts to two categories, articles and digressions. It’s almost two seperate blogs, with articles being longer posts usually discussing a topic, and digressions being short asides usually about other articles and news I’ve found.

So, I’ve decided to just show the excerpt to the newest article on the main page, and then show a list of the next articles with just their titles, date and number of comments. This shows the last ten articles in a very short amount of space, and when it was written.

This will be quite an interesting experiment, see how many visitors stay for longer with the newer design, or just leave much quicker because they find it more difficult to navigate. Hopefully it’s the former, but either way this format is here to stay!

By Zoe Hughes | Posted in Articles | Comments (6)

Opacity: browser compatability

June 7, 2006 – 10:31 am

I set out for Opacity to have complete browser support across all current platforms with a single stylesheet. However over time it’s become apparent that Internet Explorer is going to need some gentle coaxing of it’s own, in the form of an IE specific stylesheet.

I’m glad that the folks at Microsoft decided to put in conditional comments for Internet Explorer, it’s as if they knew that designers were having trouble with IE’s rendering and needed some hacks.

In any case, heres a list of currently supported browsers:

  • Mozilla Firefox 1.5
  • Opera 9 Beta 2
  • Safari 2
  • Camino 1.1

If you’re on Windows, you have two chances of having a supported browser, two if you’re on OS X, and three if you’re using Linux (assume Safari was replaced by Konqueror).

However over 50% of my current readership is still on Internet Explorer and Windows. I’m not trying to alienate you, I just want you to know what a bitch it is to develop for that browser, and that it’ll take a bit longer for all the kinks to be smoothed out.

Screenreaders

Now, lest us not forget in our haste screenreaders. I don’t know how many of my readers use screenreaders (I suspect very few), but designing a site that is read well by screenreaders means designing a site semantically well, which is what every designer should strive for. I consider Opacity to be coded semantically, and most of the pages should be valid XHTML 1.0 Strict. None of that transitional bullshit!

If you do see any errors in the support browser list, do please comment. In fact, if you see errors in any browser please do comment, the more compatability I get the better!

By Zoe Hughes | Posted in Articles | Comments (2)

Introducing Opacity

June 6, 2006 – 11:16 pm

For it’s entire life, Ejecutive has never had its own design. It’s switched from one design to another, but they were all templates for WordPress made by someone else. But finally it’s getting its own personality.

Theres nothing wrong with using another template. Kubrick and K2 are/were the most advanced and stylish designs around. However there comes a time when a site needs its own personality and structure, something that fits the style of the site more than a generic template would. Of course, I can do what many people have done and create a modified theme for K2, which serves a great base. However I felt that Ejecutive’s structure needed a more specific style that would be more suited to it, so I present, Opacity.

As is popular currently, this release is a beta release. Theres definately some rough corners currently, such as the lack of navigation links, the lack of an archives page and the lack of a search page. Well, it lacks a lot really. However I want to get this out of the door and live. I’ve been working on Opacity for six months, and the temptation to continually tweak is incredibly tempting which is why it’s taken such a long time.

I wanted to get a logo finished before I released Opacity, but I just don’t have the skill nor the time to design one at the moment, so that’ll have to wait until I gain some more Photoshop/Firework skills and get some more free time.

In the next few posts, I’m going to explain some details about Opacity and the choices I made in designing it. However for now I’m just going to relish in the fact that it’s finally out the door and I can start getting feedback on it, so please comment about what you think, and do expect the design to mature over time.

By Zoe Hughes | Posted in Articles | Comments (1)

9rules round four

May 15, 2006 – 7:56 pm

Tomorrow is round four of the 9rules site submission, will you submit this time around? It’s kind of caught me by surprise, so I still haven’t finished Opacity, something that might make this site special enough to be part of 9rules, and also spur me on to write more content. But for now, it’ll have to wait after my exams.

By Zoe Hughes | Posted in Links | Comments Off

Opacity

January 27, 2006 – 11:59 am

After recently announcing my retirement from the LiveJournal style game, I now have more time to concentrate on other projects. One of which, is the long overdue rebranding of Ejecutive.

I’ve been using other peoples WordPress themes for as long as I’ve been using WordPress. But most of the time I’ve been using themes by Michael Heilemann, and while they are fantastic, I need something more customised. Something more me. So, I introduce Opacity!

Over the next few months, I’ll be working on Opacity, which is not just a design, its a rebranding of Ejecutive. Infact, some of the rebranding has already come into shape, through the extended use of tags, noteworthy posts, new permalinks and getting rid of the old categories. The site is ready for the new theme, I just need to make it. Now, you all know of my reputation for finishing projects; only about 50% of the ones I start actually get done within a reasonable amount of time. But this project is going to be my focus for the near future, and I’m going to try my damndest to get it out-the-door.

But fear not, as this doesn’t mean an end to K2LJ, or the Poogasm series. I will be working on those as well, with K2LJ nearly finished, but SIFW/PG (which still requires a production name) will have to be put on the backburner for a bit as I try to learn Ruby on Rails for their development.

If any of you remember, the last time I flexed my design muscles was for Tastydirt, which has long since perished. It’s time I start something more permanent. And it’s about time.

By weiran | Posted in Articles | Comments Off