The Wardman Wire

Over the weekend I’ve been playing with a new alternative front end for the blog. It is designed to give a more “newsy” view than the “time-based” view of the traditional blog format, and to help make it easier to keep track of the amount of material that we are now publishing.

The idea is that there will be a more “magazine” style page on www.mattwardman.com, and the existing design will stay on www.mattwardman.com/blog/ .

Here is a screenshot of the prototype (click through for a larger screenshot), then a couple of comments:

The presentation is “topic-based”, rather than time-based as in a traditional blog, and I have grouped the various categories into “channels”; for example, “Parliaments” covers reports from the various Parliament, “Comment” covers commentary columns, “Media” covers Online Media - and so on.

I also hope that the design will make it easier for occasional visitors to keep up with larger articles on a fast-moving blog.

Finally, I am integrating a variety of RSS feeds into the design, so that www.mattwardman.com will be a good place to keep up to date with the latest news and comment.

I’m going to be doing some beta testing this week via my Twitter Feed at www.twitter.com/mattwardman. I’m not going to post the URL here, as the prototype site can only deal with a relatively small number of visitors.

However, if you would like to help me with comments etc - please join those on Twitter, and I’ll be commenting there as I experiment with different ideas for the design.

Tags: wardman wire, new blog design, twitter, beta testing[tags]wardman wire, new blog design, twitter, beta testing[/tags]