Do you really need that?
by Robert Mohns - October 10, 2007 / 3:26pm View more articles
When planning out a new web site, one of the key tasks we perform is deciding what parts of the site should be content managed, and what doesn't need it. And of those parts that require content management, define the data set and metadata that controls how it is published and displayed.
It's easy to over-specify, and easy to add features that aren't actually needed.
I present as an example the iMarc blog. Dave blogged the whole process; let me call out the notes on revising the site information architecture.
A key decision we made was to combine the rarely-updated News content with the frequently-updated Blog content. A loudly-voiced concern was that blog content would overrun news content that we wanted on the home page. The solution that was proposed and implemented was a "sticky" checkbox in the blog editor options:
Check that box and the entry will remain in the #1 spot on the home page, even when more recent blog and news articles are published. Great idea!
Six months, 40-odd blog entries and several news announcements later... nobody has used that feature. Not even once.
Wasted feature. Seemed important, turned out not to be.
There's a lesson in there somewhere.
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7 Comments
The amount of time this took to implement is still worth not having used it yet. Additionally, this feature becomes more appropriate and necessary the more frequently that people post blogs on here.
I have a parking break in my car that I don't use (and in fact, with my current car I've never used it). Is that a wasted feature because I've never used it? No way, the situation just hasn't come up yet for me. Acting reactively instead of proactively is the opposite of innovation.
So, instead of writing them in spurts as we here have a tendency of doing, we should write more and more often.
The "Four iMarc Websites Nominated for 2007 MITX Awards" posted by Dave should be stickied.
1. gets the three most recent blogs.
2. gets the one most recent sticky blog (if any)
3. merges the two results (putting result #2 first)
4. prints the top 3 in the merged result.
Who wins? The most recent sticky blog.