Oops, rather late on this one. Had a bit I wanted to elaborate on but between recovering from PAX and all the new releases and other write ups I wanted to do, this fell by the wayside. This focuses on a lot of minutia revolving around the Cblogs section but it's also picture heavy so hopefully I don't lose your beautiful, wandering eyes.

I'm planning on throwing up a contest sometime this weekend. You might have caught my initial post detailing it earlier this week that I took down after deciding to retool it a bit. Prizes abound!

As another random aside, I've finally gotten around to catching the Dtoid live streams and I've clearly been missing out. Loaded up some War Inc. Battlezone after getting ahold of one of the promo codes being given out (god bless you, Pico) and got some matches in. I highly suggest you play it if you're ever in doubt about your skills as a gamer, working people over is a breeze.



The first part I want to address are all the redundancies in links and the worst offender. The four sections circled above all literally lead to the same place and that's just no bueno. Starting from the bottom up

- The "all blogs" link is the one I tend to use since it's so close, but it's not really necessary otherwise as I expand on that later.

- The link in the main menu bar I think makes most sense and is fine where it is.

- The bottom header image under the Dtoid community logo I think should stay the same provided that the top header gets switched to the main logo and links back to the main home page.



My reasoning for replacing the Dtoid community logo and having it lead back to the main site is mostly one of consistency. I threw up some obvious examples for reference, but for the most part, that real estate on a website is usually the part of a site I use whenever I'm on any section of any site and I want to get back to the very main page.

I think then that justifies having the bottom header image link to the Cblogs main page and reduces the redundancy factor. I could be alone in this but I find whenever I want to head back to the homepage while in the Cblogs section, hitting the Home link along the main menu bar feels a bit awkward.



Next up is the menu bar right over the blog posts and why I think it could ultimately be removed. Going in a random order

- The "your blogs" link can be safely removed. I'm pretty sure it's been broken since forever so clearly no one finds a use for it. You can actually tell what the error is and where it's supposed to link if you compare the url it links to with the url of the "edit your blog" link at the very top of your page.

- The "comments" link I think could be reappropriated somewhere in the sidebar.

- The "your blogs" link is redundant given that there would be two more logically placed locations for it above.

- The "your friends" link is redundant with the one on the top right of your page near where your username is. I personally don't use this feature much anyway.

- Thinking about the last one makes me snicker since it took me a while to realize what its point was. Personally, I just click on the user's image blog header to return to their main blog if I'm on one of their specific posts, though I get the importance of a text link if the user doesn't have one. I think this feature could get reappropriated to the side bar as well.





There's a number of very minor graphical bugs in the site layout but the first one throws me off the most since it sticks out farther than it should by a pretty noticeable margin if you're looking straight at it. The green lines are for reference on how the different elements line up. The ad and the community header are the same height so it'd make simple sense for them to be lined up vertically.

Here's my vision of an improved page, click to embiggen! Lots of little graphical fixes and a nice side benefit of removing a lot of the clutter is saving on a good amount of vertical space which leads to less scrolling.



The biggest omission I didn't get to above is straight up removing the links for looking up tagged articles. I think they're perfectly valid on the main site (although I don't use them there either), but I can't imagine many people use them in the Cblogs section. If you're already in the Cblogs section then you're probably specifically concerning yourself with blog related activities and would then rather first return to the main site before looking up any articles.

Here's a side by side comparison, also click to embiggen!