Have Mac Will Blog may well be the name of this web site, but to be honest, it’s actually a prediction that has yet to be properly fulfilled. The truth is that this web site is not yet a blog. What I have posted here mostly are articles and I rarely do anything that corresponds to a simple blog – but in truth that’s because this web site is experimental in a number of ways. I wanted a place of my own to post articles more than I wanted to write Joycian thought streams about the square root of a singularity.

However, it’s about to become a blog, if I manage to pull it together, and by that I mean that I intend to have a “blog stream” as part of the content of the site. But first I have to implement “Rich Navigation.”

Rich Navigation

I have pondered the problem of web sites and particularly those web sites that equate to “magazines” for quite a while. You could state this problem as: How do you make a web site sticky so that people return to it regularly?

Well the truth is that many visitors to a web site don’t return regularly because they only arrived by accident and, having visited the site, they have no reason to come back again, and if they do, that will probably be by accident too. When I say they arrived by accident, I really mean that they arrived by a search engine. Unless, against all the odds, they find the site really intriguing, they are nothing more than tumbleweed.

However, there are some visitors that may be inclined to return, and they do return and maybe even sign up for the RSS feed. This is the real readership even if it amounts to no more than 25% of the traffic. But for most web sites, this one included, the real readership does not visit the whole web site or even have any idea of how big it is. This web site, for example, has about 1000 pages of text on it, which equates to about 500,000 words. It will eventually have a lot more than that, because I intend to put everything I’ve ever written that is worth republishing on this site, and that will probably double what’s already here, even if I never again add anything new.

So here’s the better question: How do you provide the regular web site visitor with the ability to look around and see what’s actually on the site. My answer to this is: Rich Navigation.

What I mean by that, is that a web site should provide a plethora of ways to drift through the site and find any of the content on the site. The site should be overloaded with navigation capability. There is, by the way, is a big distinction between a web site and a magazine in this respect. A magazine is sticky because it is a set of articles that are placed together in a container. They are joined up. A web site is a set of pages that are loose leaf- not joined up. You do not need to provide much navigation for a magazine, and most magazines hardly provide any, just a contents list at the front. That is because the reader will naturally go through the magazine page by page. But nobody goes through a web site page by page. In fact for most web sites, there’s no navigation mechanism that allows you to do that. Most web sites (blogs included) provide very little navigation.

So I have decided to provide a very rich navigation capability on this web site, just to see whether it provokes a different usage pattern. Click either of the navigation buttons on the right hand side to view it or click here. I’m fairly sure it will change usage patterns. What I’d like to achieve could be described as “vicarious browsing”. I’d like some visitors to the site to become intrigued enough to browse through some of the pages. That’s all – but that’s no small thing.

I have begun by adding a navigation button to the side of the screen which will bring up a navigation page that offers many options for perusing the headlines of articles added to this site. I will gradually augment this over the next few weeks with further navigation options, until I achieve a wide variety of ways to get at the content.

Will it work?

We can only wait and see. My stats suggest that about 10% of visitors to this site are curious and do meander around. If all I do is get just those people to meander more than before, that will be something.