Dudspuds Blog

I wanted to take a closer look at the Dudspuds home page to provide some insight into its form and function. In addition, this will capture how the site looks today, so I can look back in a year or two (over a beer, no doubt) and see how it’s changed. So lets get started.

Here’s the current home page, as of the date of this post.

I’ll briefly go through each of the main areas.

Create Account

You can do several things without an account…

• Search for articles
• Preview articles (meaning you can read the synopsis and see more details about the article, including the price)
• See new and popular articles
• Use RSS feeds to see new or popular articles in your favorite RSS reader (such as My Yahoo or Google Reader)

With an account, you can do even more fun stuff…

• Buy articles to read
• Build a watch list of players and teams, so Dudspuds knows which articles you are probably interested in
• See a customized homepage with relevant articles (based on your watch list)
• Get an RSS feed of relevant articles
• Receive e-mails with relevant articles

Main navigation

We tried to keep this simple.

• Home - Returns to the home page
• New - Shows new articles in the last 24 hours, 3 days, 7 days or 30 days.
• Popular - Shows popular articles in the last 24 hours, 3 days, 7 days or 30 days. Popular articles are those with user ratings.
• Search - allows you to search for articles.

Main Article List

This is the article thats for sale.

• Date - When the article was published
• Title - The title of the article. I like titles that are short, sweet and to the point.
• Synopsis - Describes what the article is about.
• Publisher Logo - Shows who wrote and published this article. Above the logo, you can see how long ago it was published.
• Ratings - Shows the number of ratings with the average rating received. The more stars, the better.
• Price - This is how much the article costs, in USD.

Short List

This is an abbreviated list of either New or Popular articles, along with the average rating and price.

Search

Pretty simple… enter any keyword, first name, last name, team or publisher and you’ll get a list of matching articles. The best matches will be on top.

New, Popular and Watch List Articles

There are three lists of articles that you’ll see… Luckily all these lists use the same format.

• New Articles - Anytime a publisher loads a new article is loaded into Dudspuds, it shows up immediately in this list. When you choose a bigger time frame, more articles show up.
• Popular Articles - As articles receive ratings, they become part of the popular list. We do some magic here to make sure an article with one rating of 5 stars doesn’t show up above an article with thirty-seven ratings averaging 4.7 stars.
• Watch List Articles - After you build a watch list, the system shows articles that match. The newest articles will be on top, so if you check the site 22 times a day, you’ll easily find the new stuff. The home page shows articles matching your watch list, if you have one.

Wrap-up

As the home page evolves, it will be interesting to see how the features information change. Based on feedback from pilot users, I’ve already got a list of improvements started. Maybe I’ll do a review of the watch list next… we’ll see.