January 2009: Changes In KerryOnWorld

A lot of new changes and features added to KerryOnWorld!

• New Questions Feature
• New Deals Feature
• Changes To Look And Feel
• Social Bookmarks
• New URL Pathing Architecture

Would appreciate your feedback!

New Questions Feature

I added a new feature to let you ask questions and give the opportunity for other members to give answers. You must be a registered user to use the Questions features.

New Deals Feature

In order to support this site, I have partnered with various companies to offer great deals on products and services. Each week I will take a moment out of my time to seek deals from these partners and post them here. If you see something you like, simply follow the link to the product/service.

Changes To Look And Feel

I made some major changes to the look and feel to the site the past few months. I wanted a more friendly, boxier look with subtle colors and easy to use navigation. I spent a lot of time on making sure the menus and categorization made sense too. Holler if you like what you see!

Social Bookmarks

At the end of each blog, deal, and question is a social bookmark section. If you have a StumbleUpon, Digg, Delicious, or Technorati account you can simply click on the icon and add the page to your bookmark list.

New URL Pathing Architecture

This feature change is a little more technical so I'll see if I can explain in it simple terms. I made major changes to all the pieces of content by changing their URL paths. You may get errors as a result of this (i.e. bad or missing links) if you had bookmarked articles on the site. I am sorry if this is the case but the changes were necessary to make the URL paths more friendlier and to divide the site up into different types of categories.

If you look around KerryOnWorld you will notice there there are different content types:

1. Blogs
2. Questions
3. Deals
4. Pages
5. Stories
6. Error pages
7. Google Search

Since KerryOnWorld allows each of our registered users to have their own blog, I wanted to aggregate everyone's blog entries into a site wide category system. The site categories list each category across the site (Entertainment, Sports, etc.). So when you click on Sports, you see the communities' blog entries about the subject of Sports.

This is what we call information architecture design. Just like a building has structure, so do websites.

General URL Format

Here is the general URL format to find things on KerryOnWorld:

• Blogs: /site-category/the-title
• Questions: /questions/question-category/the-title
• Deals: /deals/the-title
• Category Pages: /the-category
• Stories: /stories/site-category/the-title
• Error pages: /http-errornumber
• Google search: /googlesearch/search-results

If you type that into your browser, you will be taken to those page links.

Note that KerryOnWorld was designed to be blog centric. If you look at the Blogs URL signature above you don't see:

• /blogs/site-category/the-title
• /blogs/user/site-category/the-title

I didn't want to preface with /blogs or /blogs/user because it was redundant for a social community. However, questions, deals, stories and the google search pages each have their own preface so they can be distinguished.

URL Examples

Here are some specific URL examples to get a feel of what I am talking about:

• Blogs: /stocks/citigroup-4th-qtr-2008-highlights
• Questions: /questions/questions/who-do-you-think-is-going-to-win-the-superbowl
• Deals: /deals/great-deal-on-the-microsoft-lifecam-vx-3000
• Category Pages: /electronics
• Stories: /stories/my-visit-to-london
• Error pages: /http-403
• Google search: /googlesearch/search-results

That's pretty much it for now. I have a lot more ideas I want to add to the site. If you have any questions, comments, or suggestions, please feel free to leave me a message and thank you for your support.