If you are a regular reader of this blog, you may have noticed some subtle changes – or perhaps not so subtle changes – over the last couple of days, designed to make the site more easy to navigate. The site has literally outgrown itself, to the point that even I, who use it daily, have a hard time finding my way around, let alone those who land on my pages for the first time. So, with the help of a weekend, and the principle of KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid) I have hopefully transformed this blog to the better, and I’m still working on it, as a blog is always a work in progress. It will never be really finished.
Where are all the categories?
The first thing you will notice is that all the topical categories are gone. No more endless lists of supply chain this and supply chain that. Going over my traffic and stats I realized that the category and tag pages were hardly used by anybody, as my visitors went straight to a post or page without browsing. Instead of “topics” my categories have been replaced by “sources”. This reflects the supply chain of my blog that I eluded to in an earlier post:
- Literature Reviews
- Post inspired by journal articles
- Book Reviews
- Post inspired by books or book chapters
- Reports and Whitepapers
- Posts inspired by industry reports, research projects or government whitepapers
- Other Sites and Blogs
- Posts inspired by what I found on other sites or blogs
- In the News
- Posts inspired by and related to current events
- Conference Papers
- Post inspired by my own conference papers and presentations
- Research Papers
- Post inspired by my own research
- This and That
- Posts inspired by everything else
The old categories are still maintained, but they have now been converted to tags. Most of them, that is. Some have been deleted for the sake of keeping things as simple as possible.
Previously, a post could belong to several categories, which made for a very cluttered design. Such “cross-posting” would also make the same post appear many places. With the new streamlining, posts can only belong to one category, as they can only come from one source.
Site index
I have also added a site index, listing all the tags that are used on this blog, which should help you find the topic you are looking for. To enhance the index, the tags for the author names have been reversed, that is “first name + last name” is now “last name + first name”. This is because the last name is usually what you search for, when you look for particular authors.
I am still working on refining which keywords to use with which posts, so bear with me while I’m still making changes here and there.
Archive
The archive too has been improved. It now not only lists the posts, but also their date and a few snippets of text, which may be a faster way of going back in time and finding an earlier post than using the page navigation on the home page.
To the better?
All in all, I hope the changes have been to the better. What do you think? Please feel free to share your thoughts below and do not hesitate to suggest further improvements. I may not be able to comply with it, or rather, I may not know how to implement it technically, but I would love to hear your ideas anyway, so that I can search for a solution.
Related
- husdal.com: The supply chain of a blog
