Marblehead Blog Gets Eight New Features

Great customer experiences aren’t perfect at first. Initial launches are released into the jungle of customer interaction and improved using their feedback. That’s what we’ve done with the Marblehead Blog. Let us know how to make it even better in the next revision.

1 Threaded Comments

Our old format followed a two column newspaper style for comments. After several blog conversations, we noticed it became difficult to pair replies back to the original comments. Threaded comments are fairly new in the blogging community, but we felt it was a functionality stretch worth working out. After spending a week trying to get Intense Debate working, we scrapped the idea as too feature rich to fit within our design. Why include things like reputation voting when it has no purpose for us? After a few more false starts we finally found an approach that matched the design style while still giving the functionality desired.

2 Design and Typography Fine Tuning

When the blog launched, it featured several layouts and type styles that were experimental for a dynamic site. The headlines, spacing, and columns were very tough to get right. After a few months of watching the site grow and expand, we decided we could do even better. The front page might not look much different, but almost everything you see has been resized, tweaked and moved just a bit to improve the clarity and presentation of the overall experience. Individual posts got a face lift and extra tweaks as well. The text is larger and we now have the ability to add subheads, paragraph titles, pull quotes, and bullet lists. You can see some of these new style changes in this post. We worked very hard to improve the overall look of the site while maintaining the spirit of the original. If everything “just seems a little nicer” to you, then we’ve done our job.

3 Email Subscriptions

Everyone at Marblehead lives and breathes within the social blogosphere. We gleam information from RSS, distribute links on del.icio.us, and twitter everything in between. However, with RSS still in an early adapter phase, we realized many of our readers were coming back to the site or putting our blog on iGoogle to get new content. Some people simply preferred to get the new articles on their handhelds or inbox for reading offline. To that end we added an email subscription page where you can have our blog hand delivered to your inbox. If you’re interested in how RSS can help you, a great explanation can be found at ProBlogger.

4 About This Blog Page

The first link I look for when noticing a new blog is the About page. I want to know why the blog was created, what point it’s trying to make, and what spin that information will take. Once we got the content written and published, we made it easier for our new readers to find. You can now find a link to our About page in the top right corner of every page.

5 New and Improved Author Bio Pages

The most common feedback we’ve received about the Marblehead website and blog was that while interesting, it seemed a bit impersonal. People wanted to meet the faces behind such articles as Sex and Violence in Design and A Toy’s Inner Robot. Who knew? To bring our faces to the conversation, we had the great people at Hoffman+Karlsson photograph us inside the eclectic Meridian Room. Below our photos we put our various social networking links and a short bio. Viola!

»Jay    »Brandon    »Blake

6 Subscribing to Comments

One of the design problems I don’t think the blog community has been fully solved yet is following conversations once you’ve commented on someone’s blog. Currently you can either subscribe via email to the entire post (not good if you’re comment #2 out of 75), or pulling comments into your RSS reader (better, but it’s a hassle to manually unsubscribe and quite often you don’t have the original post to go along with the comments). However, it’s almost impossible to follow conversations without one of these solutions, so until there is a better way, we provided both.  All posts now have a “Follow This Post” RSS link at the top of the comments section and “Notify me of followup comments via e-mail” check box at the bottom.

7 Utility Page Updates

We increased the number of Recent Posts listed to make finding new content easier, added a new email subscription link, and put our twitter link out front for all the exciting things that happen between posts. If you join, maybe you too can cause Twitter to crash.

8 You!!!

The absolute best feature that’s been added to the Marblehead blog are all our new readers like you. In fact, for if you’ve read this far, you deserve a pat on the back. Thanks to everyone whether you lurk and observe or participate in the discussions. You rock!