I use Blogspot for my own 'Blogsite' The House of L'Stok which is, in fact a series of four (five if you include Acrux Content) Blogspot accounts connected by 'tabs' to look like a website...
The major difference between your Blog and the way that they are normally used is that...
- The normal blog is organised chronalogically where the page that you see when you enter the Blogs URL is the accumulated posts for that month. Past months (and years in slow moving Blogs!) can be accessed using the Blog Archive which is a standard inclusion in the Blog's sidebar. Think of it as a "Book" (the blog) where the "chapters" (months) are made made up of "pages" (entries), other chapters are accessed from the "Table of Contents" (the Blog Archive)
- Your blog is organised by categories and the page that you see from your URL, in a way your home or index page, shows every post that you have done. Using the above analogy, your blog is like a "scroll" where the "chapters" and "pages", the sections and entries, are all there on the front page if you scroll down far enough.
There's nothing intrinsically wrong with what you are trying to do. In a way, it is very much like a book with it's frontispiece, introduction, table of contents etc followed by sections and chapters.
In fact...
You could easily reformat the html of you blog, put page breaks in at the section and chapter points and turn it into a pdf eBook complete with hyperlinks. That would look pretty cool on
Issuu!
Your challenge, as you have said yourself, is to make it as easy as possible for your users to access the material you have amassed. To stretch our book analogy to its elastic limits (I am on the Grammar police's 'Ten Most Wanted' list!) the way this is done in publishing is in two ways: a table of contents and an index.
Now, you have a Table of Contents already, but is not immediately visible to your new visitor, in fact it is seven screens down the page. To counter this I can see that you have put a hyperlink to it directly under the title block, however it does not immediately catch your attention. I would suggest three options...
- Make your five options into one or two words spaced out along a single line under the title in large narrow bold font (Arial Narrow, Bold, 18?) like THIS or THIS...
* Contents * Quick Picks * Productions * Index * Audio, Games, Comics, Prose...
- Do the same thing as a vertical list in the sidebar but make the font broad (Impact, 18?) like THIS (yes, I know its Flash but it looks pretty!)...
Contents *
Quick Picks *
Productions *
Index *
Audio, Games, Comics, Prose *
- Put the Index you have in Blog 2 directly into the top of your sidebar, thus...
- on Blogspot go to Customize then under "Posting" pick out "Blog 2", click "edit" which should open it for editing (I believe you know how to do this). Click on the "Edit Html" tab and copy the whole of the post (put it on notepad just to be safe)
- Now click on the "Layout" tab under "page elements" click on "Add a Gadget" (something else you appear to have mastered). This should open a popup where you choose "Text" and in the "Configure Text" box put "Table of Contents" in the Title box then hit the "Edit Html" button and enter the Html from Blog 2 and hit the save button.
- You should find that this will have put the contents of Blog 2 into a text box at the top of your right hand side bar.
I mentioned earlier that the other way that you could simulate a book would be to have an index. This is done on a Blog by using "Labels". They are basically just bookmarks, just the same as you would use in a word processor, that are used as the individual entries to make up an index. What you do is to apply labels to a blog that define it best, in the "edit Posts" section of your Blog control panel, and these are then collated for future searching and indexing.
Have a look at my "Acrux Content" Blog
HERE, and at the bottom of the right hand sidebar you will see a section marked "Labels". What I have done has been to "Label" each of my posts with either a general label such as "
Fan Productions" or a specific one for each production, eg. "
ST-Fa" which is an abbreviation for Starship Farragut.
It would be a pretty mammoth job, but if you went through your Blogs and added a label for each production or even, to start off with, the major sections such as Golden age etc, you could have an index that would cover your site in your sidebar.
>Phew< I'm all suggested out for tonight! I hope that was what you were looking for. It reminds me that I should really do something to spruce up the House of L'Stok, its looking pretty dowdy these days!
Your website deserves to succeed if not from the immense amount of work that you have obviously put into it, then because of the immeasurable service that it gives to newcomers and devotees of Trek fan productions alike in pointing us to something new all the time.
Thank you
Kirok of L'Stok
------------------------- Qapla' Balth je' -------------------------
------------------------ Honour and success ------------------------
