Three things wrong with Think Vitamin’s design Hrush May 27, 2009

2 comments

I like Think Vitamin. It’s a good site with great content related to design, technology and entrepreneurship; but I think the site’s design can be improved in three specific areas.

1. If you’re reading an article, you can’t see who wrote the article without scrolling all the way down to the bottom of the article–and sometimes, that’s a long scroll! On a content site where various authors are contributing, I might want to know who wrote an article upfront; before I invest the time in reading it. This style also assumes that visitors arrive at the article page through the home page or the various section pages. If I arrived at an article directly from a search engine, the design doesn’t let me know immediately that the article may have been written by someone I’m already familiar with.
2. Authors seem to be getting the short stick on ThinkVitamin–neither the home page, nor the section level pages let you see who wrote an article. At the risk of repeating myself, the site should be doing more to highlight their authors. Many of ThinkVitamin’s contributors are well respect members of the web community and featuring their names more prominently throughout the site will probably lead to increased readership for their content.
3. Section headers within an article look anything but–in fact, they look more like they’re dividing up the page into various discrete pieces. The effect is even more pronounced because the site is largely styled as a blog. Everything within the article block is marked up as an h3, regardless of whether it is meta-data or second level headline.