I have created some views to replicate these pages with more filtering options. View Bulk Operations does come with a sample view for content, but I found that this view didn’t contain the options I wanted. Each view comes with two pages: one to replace the default admin pages (admin/content/node, admin/content/comment, and admin/user/user). It would be nice if these could be the same page but you can’t have more than one URL for a page. These are in use on The Webmaster Forums. Some of the terminology might need to be adjusted for your site, particularly the label for the taxonomy filter (forums are taxonomy terms). Views Bulk Operations is used to allow operations to be run on multiple items at once.

Warning: These views have a lot of complicated filters that may not be suitable for some users. You may want to restrict this to advanced users only (although I’m not sure there would be a situation where a user would have the administer nodes permission but wouldn’t be sophisticated enough to work with this interface!)

Below are screenshots of the three views (click to enlarge) with links to download the views.

1. What is this?
2. What do they have here?
3. What can I do here?
4. Why should I be here – and not somewhere else?

The user needs to have some clue as to whether this page or website will give them what they want (have the information they need, the products they want to buy etc.). In that sense, what appears in the fold – whatever size that is for them – is crucially important.

You also need to make sure that it’s evident that there is more content further down to scroll to. I recently visited this page on the Exercise TV site (screenshot). On my screen the fold ends around Jillian’s mid-thigh. With the blue background, the text ending where it does, and the visual focus on the photo, it wasn’t apparent to me that there is more content further down. I actually didn’t realize it until I clicked on the link to browse videos and realized that it pointed further down on the same page. With widescreen monitors the scrollbar may be out of direct view, so conscious design is needed to tell the viewer that they should scroll to see more.

Via For a Beautiful Web, where Stephen Frein has a useful comment.

There is a reason why most websites have similar basic elements. It’s called usability. When users are trying to accomplish a task (find information, buy something etc.) they don’t need to figure out an entirely new navigation structure and page layout. They need sites to behave in relatively similar ways so they know what to expect and how to accomplish their tasks.

The Web can be a repetitive and boring place. Many Web sites look the same or are created based on the same basic principles.

That’s actually a good thing There is a time and a place for trying something new, and that’s valid, it’s just not something that’s appropriate for most websites.

So, the question is, what are the most innovative web designs of all time? I’ll have to give that some thought.

On Wednesday, October 8th our websites suddenly disappeared. Our VPS (virtual private server), hosted by VPSville, was completely unavailable. There was no explanation on their website. Our only information came from a thread at Web Hosting Talk.

The VPSville site was still live, but their forum was no longer active. Supposedly they did post something on their forums early on, but quickly took the forums completely offline. Over 24 hours passed before VPSville let their customers know what was going on.

The original announcement was vague. In light of later news that some of their servers had been hacked and all the data erased, this announcement was outright misleading. Needless to say, this was completely unacceptable. Not just that they lost the data. No, the worst part was that they didn’t tell their customers what was happening.

What do do when things go wrong (revised)

1. Find out what actually happened.
2. Fess up. Admit that your systems weren’t able to handle the traffic (or whatever the problem was). Do not blame the users.
   1. Make sure this information is published and availble to clients.
   2. Ensure that communication channels are open. Make every attempt to respond to customer questions.
   3. Do not attempt to cover up the problem.
   4. If you don’t know all the details, that’s okay. Tell people what you do know.
3. Promise to get things working ASAP.
4. Do get things working ASAP.
5. Give paying customers a refund for services lost.
6. In the future, make sure your servers can handle the traffic, or plan other ways to avoid the problem.

“A spokesperson for the CRTC said the site ‘worked fine’ when it launched at midnight, and said she didn’t know what had caused it to freeze up.

She speculated that the number of people trying to access the site may have blocked access to some users

‘Try it later and cross your fingers,’ she said.”

They don’t know what happened???? “Cross your fingers”?? Did they not realize that when they announced this they’d be getting a flood of traffic? Had their web developers never heard of the Digg effect? Similar problem when you’re announcing a very attractive service in media outlets across the country.

What do do when things go wrong

1. Find out what actually happened.
2. Fess up. Admit that your systems weren’t able to handle the traffic (or whatever the problem was). Do not blame the users.
3. Promise to get the site working ASAP.
4. Do get the site working ASAP.
5. In the future, make sure your servers can handle the traffic, or plan other ways to avoid the problem.

Do you find these to be effective? I think from a design perspective they solve a lot of problems. Get a lot of links on the home page without cluttering the main interface.

The problem I find is that as a user I often miss them entirely. On Jason Santa Maria’s site it took me several visits before I even noticed it was there. Why? Because I didn’t scroll that far (on the actual articles there are often many comments, making the pages quite long. Most users wouldn’t read all those comments.)

What about my home page? Will people notice the Recent Posts block at the bottom? Will they think to scroll past the white? Granted, I was intentional in what I put there vs. what I put on the sidebar. It’s not exactly essential stuff.

Usability experts have found that users have learned to scroll (early usability research found that users wouldn’t scroll past the fold). But, do they scroll the whole page? Prioritizing Web Usability, Jacob Nielsen points out that users often won’t scroll further if they get the visual impression that there is no more content on the page. If users assume that the navigation ends with the top or left navigation bar, will they try looking further down for more links?

What do you think?

Then I read this:

HTML is easy — so easy that even a first-time user can do it. That’s because you don’t have to learn HTML to use it.

Leading word processing applications, such as Microsoft Word and AppleWorks 6, actually generate HTML webpages for you with just a few clicks of a mouse.

Noooooooo….

* link only available while my work computer is on, which is only when I’m at work, or you can try this one.

What else could they do?

1. Provide an language option when purchasing the product and only provide documentation in that language.
2. Skip the paper documentation and provide a little card with a link to the download site. Nobody reads the documentation anyway, might as well save some trees.

And the worst part about it is that the user’s guide is mostly a bunch of bullshit. Thank you for purchasing this product blah blah blah, this is what it’s does, and this is what’s included in the package. Um, I bought the product I think I know what it does!

The connection instructions are on a separate poster with diagrams only, no words at all. I’m not sure which is worse.

The dock was also wrapped in molded syrofoam, unlike the LaCie external hard drive that arrived yesterday (not for me), which had egg carton like cardboard packaging. Boo to Lenovo (although I really like my laptop so I won’t criticize them too much!)

People aren’t going to learn if you just give them the answers. This happens all the time in the forums –people post a question and someone comes along and gives them the code to paste in. That solves the problem but the poster doesn’t learn anything in the process.

With coding questions in particular I’ll often give people most of the answer, even writing out a step-by-step tutorial, but I won’t post the full code or a link to a working page. This way the user has to put things together themselves and figure out how things work. There was a really great post at Creating Passionate Users called “Cognitive Seduction and the “peekaboo” law”:

In learning, the more you fill things in and hold the learner’s hand, the less their brain will engage. If they don’t need to fire a single neuron to walk through the tutorial, lesson, lecture, etc., they’re getting a shallow, surface-level, non-memorable exposure of “covered” material, but… what’s the point?

(I totally love that blog. So sad that she’s no longer posting. It’s a must read if you’re interested in education and/or software development or something in between).

With the tutorial in question I came out with some samples of the code I would need to do something similar to what I really want to do. It doesn’t help me understand what those variables are doing and how I can use them in different ways. Not a tutorial.

See, it’s a short post for once. Aren’t you happy?

The new design is surely nicer looking than the old (although I didn’t really have a problem with the old design). They’ve made quite a few interface changes – some good, some not so good. Read on to see some screenshots and analysis of the new interface.

I must preface this by saying that I haven’t had a chance to read much about the new design – there may be some rationale for a lot of these changes that I don’t know about. I also don’t participate at the WordPress forums. Of the old WordPress admin panel, Happy cog says:

“There was a randomness and unpredictability to everything from the location of key functions to the number of items in the navigation menu.”

I don’t feel that the new interface is much of an improvement in this regard. In fact, I find some elements to be even more random and unpredictable than before. I gather that they were trying to keep the peripheral tasks out of the way, but what they’ve ended up doing is mixing different types of tasks and moving some things too far from where you need them.

Note: Screenshots of the old WordPress interface are available here (those are from a slightly older version but you’ll get the gist). In this post all screenshots link to the full versions.

The header

This is the new WordPress header:

Notice how they’ve split up the navigation links into 2 main places with some secondary links at the very top (They all used to be in one long list). My biggest problem with this is that the design link is in with the content editing links and not with the administration. As we’ll see below, the designers seem to think that WordPress users change their themes a lot. I don’t.

The dashboard link has also been moved way up to the top corner where you can barely even see it. The dashboard is an important page, the link to it should be more prominent.

The dashboard

The new dashboard layout is one of the most celebrated changes in WordPress 2.5. The old dashboard had a brief welcome bit with some quick links to common tasks and a sidebar with links to your latest incoming links, comments and posts. The bulk of the page was made up of recent news from the WordPress development blog. Not the greatest use of space.

The new dashboard has improved the information provided but I still think it could be better. Take the top section under the orange header:

One of my big annoyances with this page is the way they’ve done the incoming links box:

Almost everything about this is wrong:

• The list does not include the title of the post being linked.
• The link is on the word “saying”, not the post tile. We know now to avoid “click here” links, right? This is the same thing.
• The quoted text is the opening line of the post, not the reference to your post.

You can edit this box but that only allows you to change the number of items shown and the post date (which was not displayed by default, if I remember correctly). For me the option to show the date doesn’t actually work.

The incoming links box should:

• display the title of the linking post.
• display the date of the linking post.
• display the author/site title of the linking post.
• if possible, display the context of the link to your site.
• link the title to the referrring page.
• provide options to let you turn all of these elements on or off.

(And, yes, my backlinks are really pathetic!)

The post composer & editor

This is where you go to write new posts. In the new interface they’ve moved a lot of the options to the space below the post editor, instead of keeping them in the sidebar. The only thing they kept in the sidebar is the preview and save/publish links, plus a list of related links.

There are a couple of reasons why this is really annoying:

• When I finish writing a post, my eye is at the bottom of the post text box. Now I want to either preview my post or publish it. But where are the buttons to do that? Not right underneath the post box where they should be, they’re over in the sidebar near the top of the page.
• When i start writing a post I want to make sure I remember to enter the tags and categories. In the old interface this was next to the post box where I could see it from the start. Now I have to remember to scroll down below the bottom of the post box and fill in those options.
• Meanwhile, the permalink edit option is right at the top, under the title of the post. How does that make sense? (Not shown in screenshot – this only shows up after a post has been saved once)
• The new arrangement of the page, along with the larger size of headings and bigger margins means that this is a much longer page than it used to be. There’s a lot of unnecessary scrolling.
• The related links bit is really unnecessary because those pages are easily accessible through the header menus

The image uploader

One of the things they’ve added here is a media library feature that can be accessed through the write interface. It seems they think that WordPress users like to add a lot of audio and video and stuff. I don’t. Image uploading is enough for me.

The other problem with this tool is that it doesn’t actually work. I found out later that it uses flash, which is a bit of an issue in Opera/Linux. (Flash does work in Opera/Linux, it just doesn’t work well). I was fiddling around with my permissions trying to figure out why this didn’t work but it turns out that all sorts of other things could be going wrong. I didn’t get any error messages either.

I’m also not a huge fan of the lightbox effect. I guess some people think this is cool but for me it’s kind of lame and annoying.

Other new features

I am happy that the new visual editor works in Opera. I can write HTML just fine but when I’m writing I prefer to concentrate on writing and looking at mark-up gets in the way.

Tagging is fully integrated in the 2.5 which is nice to have. You used to have to install a plugin for that. However, I must wonder if it’s really necessary to include these things in core when they can be easily managed by plugins.

It is really awesome to have notification of updates to plugins and an easy way to install them quickly. Although now I know how to use wget and I’d rather do it that way…

Final thoughts

I guess this release was designed with a certain type of blogger in mind. Someone who uses a lot of multimedia and changes themes a lot. That’s not me. I’m not a super hard core wordpress user like some people. I like the platform but I don’t really have time to spend much time playing with it and participating in the community. I guess it’s time for me to delve into creating a custom CSS and checking out some of the plugins available for the admin panel.

Edit: I just came in to fix some type-os and once again attempted to scroll to the bottom to find the save button! This is going to take some getting used to.