Startups, Fix Your Blog Links

http://blog.jazzychad.net/2012/05/28/startups-fix-your-blog-links.html

by jazzychad • 14 years ago

56 25 14 years ago

blog.jazzychad.net

rcknight2• 14 years ago

Definitely agree that this is an issue, it often bugs me ... but the site linked presents the same problem, why can't i click my way to jazzychad.net?

Jazzychad - Fix Your Blog Links ;)

jazzychad4• 14 years ago

This is true, there's not a direct link from my blog to my homepage... however I think that personal blogs fit it a different category. I'm not trying to sell my readers anything (except opinionated advice!), but the argument could be made that I am selling myself as the product.

At least you can click your way there through the "About" link in the header, albeit that is two clicks.

Edit: Ok, after lots of people calling me out on this, I've added a link to my homepage in the nav section :)

rcknight2• 14 years ago

I did notice that after my reply ... still, the main page tells me at least as much about you as your about page, and I often want to find out more about the author of an article I enjoyed, you are indeed the product!

rmATinnovafy4• 14 years ago

You should link them. People will find them either way.

rmATinnovafy4• 14 years ago

From article:

"I'm not just picking on Flattr, they are just the last in a long line of blogs that have done this."

i++;

borski6• 14 years ago

Rather than linking to the homepage, we chose to make sure we linked to our relevant About page. http://blog.tinfoilsecurity.com

jazzychad4• 14 years ago

That's great, but I would also argue that linking the big "Tinfoil Security" logo to the blog homepage is even more annoying. I feel like I've been tricked since I expected that to go to the homepage.

borski6• 14 years ago

Hm, that's a fair point. Would it be better to point that logo to our homepage and have a separate Blog link?

netfire2• 14 years ago

The whole navigation when on your blog seems confusing. If you click on the logo while on the blog, you get the blog home, but if you click the about link, you are taken to the main site with similar navigation (and a similar looking logo/layout). You really don't get the feeling that you've left the blog site.

Wouldn't it be simpler and much more straightforward to just add a blog link to both your blog and your main site, make your blog look like your main site and make the logo link to your main site. After all, isn't your blog part of your main site?

Also, when you click on your profile link on the right of your blog you get a posterous profile page. Seems like that should link to the about page as well.

borski6• 14 years ago

I've updated the blog header a bit to have the logo take you to the home page and have a Blog link just for the blog.

Heh, it's not actually part of the "main site"; we're using Posterous for the blog, but I'm really happy you think it is part of it -- means my CSS hacks have worked. :)

rmATinnovafy4• 14 years ago

I like the overall theme behind your design. Yet the site feels clumsy to navigate. The layout does not seem to follow some sort of grid. The links are far apart. The short about you have to the left of the site describing what you do looks like a wall of text. Dunno. It makes it look amateurish. Something not good when your product is security.

So much, in fact, that when I saw your pricing I had to do a double take. Eight hundred dollars a month for a service when the site looks amateurish?

I don't mean to humiliate you publicly. But you must look into that. It doesnt look right.

borski6• 14 years ago

Heh, it takes a lot more than that to humiliate me, and we appreciate the feedback. I assure you we aren't amateurs; certainly not in the security space.

We're working on a redesign, but I'm sure if you asked any of our customers about our internal design (which does follow a grid and was sort of a v2 of our external design) they'd say they were pretty happy with it thus far. Doesn't mean it can't improve, of course. Design is incredibly important to us and we're always working on making it better.

But I assure you we're looking into the external design and making it even cleaner than it already is.

firefoxman1• 14 years ago

I thought "YES! Please!" as soon as I saw the post title. It's one of those things that always annoyed me, but not enough to say anything about it.

kenrikm• 14 years ago

I had exactly the same issue with the flattr blog. I tried flattr.net then got to flattr.com but it was a pain and involved me typing in the URL. Bad! Anyway big +1.

cvanderlinden• 14 years ago

Thanks for this post. I thought I was the only one getting a little upset about this.

degenerate• 14 years ago

This is my biggest pet peeve on the entire internet. It seems no matter how intelligent and creative some people are, they always screw this up.

It's like when someone has bad breath, but online. You really don't want to mention it...

kapilkale• 14 years ago

There's a secondary reason for this: SEO. If your blog gets links from other blogs, you'll want that link juice to flow back to your main site for Google rankings.

languagehacker• 14 years ago

I wonder if JazzyChad would have used Flattr's blog as an example, or written this post at all, if Flattr hadn't made it to the front page six hours before this was posted.

jazzychad4• 14 years ago

I would not have. Their link on HN was the straw that broke my back and finally pushed me to write my post. In fact, I say as much in the post :)

scott_hardy• 14 years ago

I actually thought the exact same thing when I was browsing the Flattr blog. I spent a good 10 seconds looking for a link to the real site before giving up and manually changing the URL.

Startups, Fix Your Blog Links

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