(How’s that “edit” function coming along?)

Simulcast maybe????hint hint :)

I love how you can search the archives by date like that. Very cool. I’m also diggin the new “Music” tab - very organized fellas. =)

On a side note, I appreciate the design of this website - it doesn’t give me a headache!

nice work

tina

I have a photo I would like to post that has to do with a special Hobbit place I found a while back..Does anyone know if there is a way to post it?

If anyone is interested, this is a website that talks about eye tracking heat maps: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/reading_pattern.html

I believe this should be the website that performs the study: http://eyetrack.poynter.org/index.html
(It’s been a while since I last looked it up)

Heatmaps are conducted on certain sites to determine where and what people are reading first. This tell the web designer exactly how the text on the page should look, where it’ll fit, what size to use, etc…

A quick note to the heatmap links above……. The study shows that in a picture of a baseball player… Women will look at the baseball players face. Men will look at the guys face and bat, and also…. His crotch….

Finally…..You said:

“Most websites offer a dedicated search feature that, depending on its parameters, will produce in-depth results. Ironically, site based searches are commonly underused, something that I have never understood.”

My answer (After being on the internet since 1993):

The search feature is not used because people don’t believe it will find the data they are looking for. People use google search because they know in advance it’s a general search that simply searches web pages. The problem with site searches is that it’s not standard. Some will only search titles, others the content… This simply turns the reader off of doing a search on a site…. To correct this… you could always put a popup or a message beside the search that says: “This will search all titles and content on this site.” this will reassure the user that the search is “doing all it can” to find what they are looking for.

As an example, before heading to your Kingston show this weekend, my gf wanted to know the set list…. She used your search and couldn’t find it. I told her to try google search with these parameters: “Site:www.matthewgood.org Kingston setlist 2008” I believe that this had returned the proper results… (As a sidenote, you should probably have a dedicated section for your setlist as I’ve seen great interest from people wanting to know in advance what you will play at each show… )

To transition to an almost similar topic:
Something should be said about our inbox’s… When’s the last time we deleted something?  I read an article recently on how people refuse to delete stuff from their inbox, or categorize it badly (creating folders with peoples names, instead of using “Search Folders”). There’s a technique out where you only need 4 folders. If you would like to learn more, let me know

Suggestion: Your site looks great, but I would consider useing a width of 620 instead of 570. 570 personally feels like it’s not wide enough. If it could just be a touch wider, it would be great… Just a suggestion though

Dale/Matt: I believe Dale is the site designer? I think, Dale, you were the one i asked if Matt would sign a cd before you got on the bus in Kingston… hehe… Good work guys keeping upto date with site design and layouts… :-)

I will stop now as I’ve written too much… However if people want to know more, or disagree, just let me know in your replies…

Frank

My gf is huge fan of Matt and pointed me to this story… (I’m a computer programmer here in Montreal…)

I do agree that designing with white space in mind is a difficult task. It’s easy to just throw everything on a page and hope people will be interested enough to read everything…

That said…. Appearance is everything… A well designed website will attract visitors because it looks professional. Once they’ve reached the site, you need to keep them there. White space allows them to “breath”. However…….. There’s another key aspect to a good website. That’s font size and font style. Once they’ve reached your site, you need to “tell“ your visitors what to read first. For example, to instruct the reader to read the title first, you simply have a larger font than the content. In your case, you have a great site, primarily because you have a 1 column design. From there, you have a title in a large 16 pixel font size. This tells the reader right away where to start.

This holds the same weight for large multi-column websites. You must use larger darker fonts to denote where to have to readers eyes move first. Once they’ve read the title, their eyes need to be guided. They obviously know that if it’s a title, below should be the story, thus the story goes below, however in a slightly lighter font color, and in a standard font size. The key to the story is that it cannot have too much content initially. For example, your main page has only a part of the story to allow the reader to view the other titles since not everyone will be interested in (WEB 2.0 ;-) Askmen.com is another example where they have a simple format where each story is only 3 pages long. This keeps the reader interested just long enough to breeze through the story and move on. It’s divided up into pages to allow the reader to decide if they want to keep going.

Might I suggest, if it’s not already on the agenda, alt tags for the little icons at the top (you know, the RSS feed, Flickr, etc.)?

It might be related to your browser. I see them using Safari on a Mac.

As a graphic designer myself I too am an advocate of white space. Less is more as they say (think Apple v Microshaft…). But it sure is tricky translating static paper designs to the web. And then, just when you think you’ve got it looking OK you’ll see it doesn’t work in such-and-such browser. Tip: even though I loathe the things it is worth testing your spanking, shiny new designs on a PC…though I’m sure you’re also one step ahead on that one too…:0)

Might I suggest, if it’s not already on the agenda, alt tags for the little icons at the top (you know, the RSS feed, Flickr, etc.)?

Looking forward to the search function. :)