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Imagine you have an excellent site. The content you produce is interesting, and the way you interact with readers is nice too. You run your site well, and your readers tag along. One way to appreciate your site visitors more is to give them choices. You can allow the visitors to do different things in ways that they wish, thus not indirectly forcing everyone to interact with your site the way you design or run your site. The same way you throw a party and offer more than one thing to eat or drink to your guests, you should offer more site choices to your site readers.
Offer more designs to choose from
One of the more interesting ways to give your readers different options is to allow your site visitors to choose from different layouts. Give your site visitors a few site layouts to choose from. That way, different users can choose the design they want and change the way your site looks. That is better than having the same site design indirectly forced onto every site reader.
Offer more languages to read your site in
Offering translated versions of your site is another way to give readers more options. For the concept that I am referring to, the reason you offer translated versions of your blog is not to only focus on people who speak different languages, but to allow people who speak more than one language to be able to choose a language they prefer. For example, if a reader speaks both English and French, and you blog in English, the reader might prefer reading your site in French and will appreciate the fact that you offer a French version of your English blog.
Offer more ways to access your site
Offering your readers choices allows you to let your readers read your site the way they want to read it. Offering RSS feeds is one of the popular ways to allow people to read your site. Offering daily e-mail subscriptions is also another way to allow your readers to access your content.
The more types of effective and useful choices you give your readers, the more happy they will be with you. What is your opinion on this? Can you think of more types of options you can give to your site/blog visitors?
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I totally agree about RSS feeds, after all these are expected and it would be a disservice to deny it; however, I am not entirely convinced about alternate designs.
I would suggest that the design should be one that best communicates your vision to your readers. My site design reflects my methodology and says something important about me, as all designs should. The design should add an unconscious element to the content.
I would suggest that providing alternative designs to cope with the readers’ preferences would be to diminish the impact of the site as a whole; although, I have no problem with creating a design to format content in different ways.
Thanks Andrew.
That is an interesting point about offering more than one design selection to the readers and the availability of such choices, reducing the effective “impact” of the site in question. So basically, you are looking at design as being unique and something that can be unique like content. We usually do not offer multiple written versions of the same post, so in your view we should also offer a single design as being unique, right? That does raise an important question: how important is design, and is it as important or even better than the content itself?
Thanks again Andrew; this has got me thinking about the possibilities of such a question and idea. I will probably write a note or two on this topic.
Bes, that is pretty much what I meant.
While the content will change and be specific to a particular topic the design that contains it will provide that content with context and say something on a site-wide level.
Do I think the design is more important than the content? No I don’t; I believe the content is the most important thing but that the design facilitates the understanding of that content by explaining something about the site or the author.