Skribit Blog

We recently rolled out several substantial changes to Skribit.com and I’ll take this time to briefly show them off a bit. First off, the homepage has been restructured. The point of this update was to help new visitors easily understand what Skribit is all about as well as help direct users to the signup flow. Below the fold, we show off some featured blogs and recently active blogs while highlighting their recent posts. This is contrasted to our previous layout that listed popular and recently blogged suggestions. We think the new layout should help bring bloggers more visitors and fans!

In addition the main menu navigation was updated to promote some of our pages that had previously been only linked in the footer. Our about page is one of those pages. We want to promote Skribit and tell our story to show you guys that we’re not just some random startup, so prominently linking to our about page is a great way of doing that.

Tooltips!

This is one of the tiny new site features that I loved implementing. Throughout the site you can hover over certain links (for example a blog name, user, status indicator) and get more information in a little window that appears next to your mouse. Quite handy and makes browsing the site much more enjoyable.

Here are a few live examples:

User Dashboard

Instead of logging in and seeing the homepage again, Skribit users now get redirected to our new dashboard. Admittedly, its utility is currently a bit on the low side but we have big plans for the dashboard in the future and hope to make it easy for Skribit users to control their suggestions and find other great blogs and content through it.

Explore, PRO accounts, Groups, etc

Last but not least with this feature rollout, we made an Explore page to highlight some of the content throughout the site and make it easy to find more of that. We’re still tweaking the layout and pondering how to best present that information so things might change on that page.

One of the biggest reasons for the homepage update was to grow awareness about our PRO accounts. Previously they were somewhat hidden among upgrade links, but now they are on center stage and people more readily know that their account can get more features with a quick upgrade.

And one small note – we have currently removed Groups functionality from the site pending a complete overhaul. We hate to admit when we’re wrong but Groups just wasn’t working out and was getting more spam than actual usage. That being said, we are planning a relaunch sometime later in the summer of a feature called Topics where topics/groups will automatically be formed around popular areas of interest, so they don’t have to explicitly be made by any one user. That’s the idea at least. Final execution will vary. If you have any ideas about how we should build out Topics, please let us know! We’re always open to new ideas and feedback.

I think that’s it for this blog post. There are of course many tiny updates throughout the site, as always. For example, the login page was restructured a bit and forms were made larger.

Once again, thanks for using Skribit!