Sunday, June 30, 2013

Summer is the time to play

Updated 7:00AM This was an interesting idea. I found some other navigation features that made this a pain to use for me so I have already removed this new layout.

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Yes, school is out and there is time to play. I will be taking advantage of some vacation time to do some fun stuff this week too. Not that I don't have fun during the normal week. I do, really. Between work and volunteer efforts for this site and the Food Pantry, you probably see that I like to keep busy. I also like to have fun!!!

One of the play areas for this week is with the layout on this website. Google's Blogger software which drives this site has some features that I'd like to test. For those of you reading this during the week, I'd like you to play along.

Dynamic views is one of the templates that I can use which also gives you the reader a choice for how you would prefer to read this site. I have it currently set to default to the Magazine view but you can change it. One of the decision points will be does this new view really allow you to read this page better?

As I tested with Internet Explorer I found this view:

IE shows the dynamic view
IE shows the dynamic view

with Firefox I found this:

Firefox shows the dynamic view
Firefox shows the dynamic view

and with Chrome I found this:

Chrome shows the dynamic view

Statistically you come to read this page with Internet Explorer (29%), Firefox (25%), Chrome (20%), Opera (10%), Safari (10%) and all others (16%).

One key difference among the views shown above: Only Chrome gives you the option of changing the view and only Chrome give you the option of navigating among the sidebar links I provide for you.

(Note in the screen shots above that IE and Firefox show a black line across the top with no text visible. The visible text is only shown in the Chrome view. This text allows you to change the view and to navigate among the tabs.)

The numbers tell me that giving this full functionality to only 1 of 5 of my readers is probably not going to work. However, you do get to have your say in this matter.

  • Many of you read via the daily email updates and hardly ever come to the web site itself. 
  • Many of you read via Facebook and only when the link is really interesting come here to get the full set of details. 


So who wins in all of this? 
You should. You are the ones reading.
Leave a comment or send me an email on what you think I should do with this layout test.


Do you like the dynamic views or should I return to the previous layout?

Updated 7:00AM This was an interesting idea. I found some other navigation features that made this a pain to use for me so I have already removed this new layout.

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