Website complications
It’s the first Wednesday of the month again, time for a post for the Insecure Writer’s Support Group.
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Recently I was a co-host on an IWSG day. Like all co-hosts, I visited a certain number of websites and commented on their posts. And I encountered some difficulties. Not with the posts’ content, per se, and not with my comments (that issue has been resolved by Google), but with finding the relevant posts. Some websites and blogs employ unusual templates that require endless scrolling before you can get to the latest posts. With such templates, navigation is complicated. All the posts on such blogs are arranged as icons, usually grouped thematically, and discovering one IWSG post among dozens of others is a time-consuming chore.
I’m sure the template creators thought it would be a more modern approach – like swiping up and down or sideways on a cellphone screen – but this approach doesn’t work well on a computer. A computer screen functions much better with a more logical structure: a menu below the header and the latest post always above all the others. Like our Ninja Captain’s website, for example.
Perhaps writers who want their posts read widely should consider changing their templates to accommodate a laptop, not just a cellphone. Of course, more and more people do everything digital on their phones these days, but still. The latest post should always be on top, not hidden in the field of others below.
Another pet peeve of mine: many sites have a pop-up that requests that the readers subscribe to the blog. Sometimes, I haven’t even got enough time to read one post before this pop-up unfolds, interrupting my reading. It feels intrusive and aggressive. Subscription should be totally voluntary, in my opinion, and not pushed on the visitors by cheap gimmicks. There is always an option to subscribe on the side of most blogs. If I want to, I’ll go there.
What about you? Do you have any problems with certain website templates? Tell me in the comments.
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A little bragging. One of our members, Pat Garcia, has a new story published on Amazon. I made the cover for it. You can see it here. I’m proud of this cover.
