topic Re: Blog Categories in Community Site Feedback

Blog Categories

Kelly — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 13:59:38 GMT

As part of the reskin we did of the Community site we restructured the way the blogs work, merging them into one.
The idea was to allow us to more intelligently present the blogs for people to read. This works on categorisation.
Check out the image attached. The area circled in green is what we call 'announcements'. Anything we categorise as an announcement will remain in this space. Orange is 'Tech News'. This we've relegated from the main strip to being a separate section so that it doesn't get in the way of PlusNet news/posts.
Now, the highlighted in purple is were we are running into trouble. At the moment, anything we categorise as being 'PlusNet News' appears here. However, that means that anything we don't consider to be news (the Festive Faults as an example) won't appear on the front page.
This presents us with a challenge: How do we get visibility of all of the posts that we don't want to call 'PlusNet news'? It gets worse when you add the End of Days into the equation as their frequency and current placement within the PlusNet news category means they very quickly push any other content out of view.
In fact, because we appear to be producing so much blog content (that we are reasonably happy with publishing) that having everything on the front page like a normal blog just doesn't work.
Our current theory is that we need to develop the categories to allow people to browse the content better. Like on the beebs news page, categories effectively direct interested readers to the content.
Our categories are currently a mess due to how we used to use them as tags. The upgrade to a more recent version of Wordpress has given us tagging functionality so I've been able to begin to clean this up, but it's apparent that we need to review the categories to allow people to find posts they'd be interested in.
Here was my first stab as a category/subcategory list:

Category	SubCategory	Notes
News	Announcements	Appears in announcements section
	General News	Appears on front page news section
	New Features	Appears on front page news section
	Residential Products	Appears on front page news section
	Business Products	Appears on front page news section
	Industry and Technology News	Appears in the Tech News section
	New Features	Appears on front page news section
Inside PlusNet	End of Day Reports	Visible somewhere on the front page
	Incident Reports	Reports of when we blow something up
	Life In Plusnet	General posts about working here.
	Customer Satisfaction Reports	Updates on our monthly customer sat results.
	Traffic Management	Specific category for Tommos pots.
Guides and Tutorials		To cover things like this post
Web Technology	Innovation and the Internet	Covers the posts by Dean/Matt/Dan
	Coding	Techie/geeky posts from our developers
	Web Design	Techie/geeky posts from our web designers
	????	more techie categories as necessary

This gives us 4 top level categories, with sub categories if people want them.
So, what do people think to that idea? Would you be able to browse those categories and find what you were interested in?
Each category and subcategory can be bookmarked/subscribed to with RSS/atom feeds so if you are only interested in one after, or some of the areas you could control that. We'd also allow a 'subscribe to all' feed as well.

Re: Blog Categories

jelv — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 22:11:10 GMT

Guides and Tutorials - would this be a good slot to integrate all the tutorials on Usertools? Many of those need some reviewing!
How have you got it in mind to present these categories? I quite like the way Google Reader shows you one line for each post which expands when you click on it - just showing the first paragraph or so with a link to the full post. Perhaps four boxes with the latest post in each expanded by default and the latest 8 or ten listed.
I also think there is a case for treating regular posts such as EOD specially so that only the latest is shown with an easy link to get to the full list of EODs.

Re: Blog Categories

Kelly — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 22:25:22 GMT

Guides and Tutorials would be a holding category for any support like blog posts, until we got the customer driven support pages created. it could then lead to a home page for that sort of thing?
We aren't sure about presentation yet. They exist right now on the right, albiet in their untidied categories. HOwever, these don't really jump out as a navigation element. We could put it on the left as a nav menus, which when you click in opens up subcategories.
All to be explored really!

Re: Blog Categories

snozboz — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 01:12:52 GMT

Re your categorisation heirachy, "Industry and Technology News" sticks out as possibly not fitting in with the rest that is more plusnet centric.
I think I'd want to see different sections & prioritised thus:
a) single line links to active & most recent announcements and news of any sort from PlusNet,
b) the most recent EOD's first para and link to listing of old EODs,
c) and first paragraphs of more in-depth articles like Industry news, Coding, Web design, etc.
A thought: why not use the categorisation used in the forums? We're familiar with it, and it would help new users of the site too.
BBFN
Martin

Re: Blog Categories

ChrisL — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 14:11:52 GMT

The BBC beta works with "widgets" so the user can choose which categories regularly appear on the home page. Any chance of doing something like this?

Re: Blog Categories

zubel — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 15:27:16 GMT

*thump*
^^ That was the sound of Colin hitting the floor
B.

Re: Blog Categories

Tue, 19 Feb 2008 15:30:31 GMT

I would profess a dislike for news which isn't new.
If there isn't something thats less than x days old, the latest news should not be there - the space could be better used by other content IMO.

Re: Blog Categories

Kelly — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 15:12:32 GMT

Chris, one of our web designers is playing with some ideas. Once he's got something he's happy with, I'll show you guys

Re: Blog Categories

ChrisL — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 14:21:03 GMT

Hope I didn't kick this work into a deep pit!

Re: Blog Categories

Colin — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 14:39:44 GMT

Nah, he's been off ill unfortunately.