This is an update to my last post…
I just got an email from Alex King, one of the FeedLounge gurus, since he couldn’t comment here for some reason. Apparently I had overlooked their System Status page, which had been tucked away in the right column of their support page, and I didn’t pay any attention to their Forums either, since I find the information to noise ratio in forums too low for efficient communication.
Looks like they did provide information during the outages, I just wasn’t looking in the right places (I expected this to be blog-worthy news, but I guess I was wrong). Ahh well, in the future I shall know…
Um, “tucked away” on the support page? Where do you think it should be?
That’s a good question. As I said, I was expecting to see a blog entry posted about it, so I wasn’t really looking much further. Maybe it would make a good addition to the main menu (“About, Blog, Forums, Support, Status”?), since there appears to be enough room (and since Forums is there as well).
I think the only reason I missed it entirely when I was reading your FAQ the other day was because of the Support page’s layout. On all the other pages of the FeedLounge site, the left column has the primary focus. All the content is there. On the main page, there really isn’t much of anything in the right column that would draw the average user’s attention.
Then you get to the Support page, and you’re reading the FAQ items in the left column, and somehow totally skip over everything in the right column, just like you had on all the other pages of the site, not realizing that it’s intended as an extension of the content (particularly since it’s much less content).
Again, thanks for your response Alex. Nice to see you guys are really living up to your promise to listen to users!
That technique (everything in the top menu) doesn’t scale very well.
True, but I think the system status is a prominent enough feature that should be readily available. Think about the number of visitors who are going to come looking for the system status, and the number of visitors coming to repeatedly view the About page.
Granted you want new users to be able to find out information about you, but returning users should also easily be able to access the info they’re looking for. System Status would seem to me to be even more frequently used than the Forums, but that’s just me.
Anyway, your site… Do what you will. Just my 2 cents, thanks for listening.