Blog Report: Recommend Changes To SparkleCityBlogs.com

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been working on updating and reorganizing the Spark’s local blog-centric sister site, SparkleCityBlogs.com. All of the blogs are now arranged by category, and (unlike before) all of the active blogs are now part of the central blog feed. This means that there’s a great deal more content being reposted on the site, which is great if you’re obsessed with local blogs.

Unfortunately, the site also looks kind of … well … bad. All of the recent posts are presented in their entirely, making it look like someone spilled website gumbo all over your computer screen. And while there’s not much to navigate to — the site is little more than a glorified blogroll — the existing navigation does seem confusing.

So, instead of telling you about the happenings on the local blog scene in the last week, I thought I’d ask for some feedback on how to make this resource for local bloggers easier to read, easier to use, and maybe even get some ideas about what features it could offer that it currently doesn’t. The site is admittedly imperfect, so how can we improve it?

One thought I had was to use the same kind of compressed excerpt format that the Spark’s frontpage uses. Posts get a few sentences and one thumbnail image on the front page. If you want to see more, you’ve got to visit the blog itself. This would have two advantages: First, it would tighten up the overall look of the site; and second, it would encourage people to actually visit the sites in question, since the full content wouldn’t be visible on SparkleCityBlogs itself.

If the content itself can be tightened, we could also add in more sidebar options. Since SparkleCityBlogs actually archives old blog posts, and since those posts are searchable, you can find a wealth of older, locally relevant content in one central location. We could also add in tag clouds, enabling people to see what the most popular topics of conversation are on the local blogosphere.

And should we also include blog-specific ads on the site, much like we allow on the Spark? Are there other add ons you’d like to see?

Also, I’m wondering of the project could use a logo. Any ideas on that front would be very welcome indeed.

Tags: Blog Report, Community, In-House, Sparkle City Blogs

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 7th, 2009 at 2:02 pm and is filed under General, Opinion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.