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!