While this solves the problem of getting "stuck" in the blog, you can do a lot more than just a link back to your homepage
Tumblr customization isn't that difficult -- and I think people with a basic understanding of HTML/CSS should be able to figure out how to do something like this.
A large number of sites (including ours) have a top nav.
We changed the whole top nav on our tumblr blog to look just like the rest of the site. The user can also access any part of our site this way.
Yes, this is exactly right. Using a separate service like tumblr or blogger for your business's blog is fine. Hell, it's even smart, because unless you're in a rare situation where an atypical blog is a central feature of your site (like, say, Less Wrong), you should let someone else worry about managing the blogging software.
But you absolutely need to have your web developer integrate it properly with the rest of your site. Pointing the DNS over to the blogging service is a fine little trick for making everything look professional, but it is not half as important as making the blog feel like it's part of your website.
Posting this mainly because I hadn't realized how much Tumblr customizes their mobile experience--not sure what a good solution to this is if a sizable percentage of your readers are on iOS.
Thanks! I know tumlr has its own iPhone version that overrides default (if you leave it as so in settings), but we hadn't given much thought to customizing it.
A surprisingly low amount (5%) of our readers are on iOS, but maybe it's in part because of the experience.
I also didn't realize how big of a crowd was interested in even the simplest tumblr blog customization, judging by how long this post sat in the #1 spot on HN.
Perhaps we'll customize our mobile tumblr as well, and do a nice little write-up on how to customize both to match your "real" site :)
I clicked on the author's face and name and it took me to a Medium page. Luckily, I can see he's the founder of a twitter profile called "Scoutzie" which clears-up what his business is. /sarcasm
I don't get your sarcasm. Where would you suppose clicking on my face should have led you? It's the Medium blogging engine and it is in their interest to have you follow from one of my posts to others, then to my collections, then to collections of others. Pretty obvious flow of things.
This implies that the reader should understand the behaviour of whatever particular blogging engine/platform the author is using.
How is understanding that clicking on a face in medium does one thing any different than understanding that clicking on the header in a tumblr does something else?
But it doesn't. When you click on my head on Medium, I don't expect you to land on my home page , or my company page, or any other page that is mine on the internet. As far as Medium and readers are concerned, my Medium profile is your destination (https://medium.com/@kirillzubovsky). On there you see all my posts and all the social information that I provided, and you can further explore the service and/or my links if you choose to.
The equivalent of a Tumblr logo on Medium would be their "M" logo. When you click that, you end up on their front page, and not on my profile, which is what you should expect.
You are partially correct, this implies that the user understands the basic behavior of the web and expects my photo to lead to one place and "M" to another.
Lets not conflate this with the M logo, which wasn't my point (I don't think either of us would expect the Tumblr logo to take you anywhere other than Tumblr).
The point, correct me if I'm wrong, of your post was that a company's logo on their Tumblr blog should go to their own website and not to the root of their Tumblr blog. Yet, because your blog is on Medium it's ok that none of the titles go to your homepage?
I want to find out more about you. I click on your picture, it takes me to a profile on Medium, which links to your about.me profile and your twitter profile (and mentions a twitter handle for Scoutize). I then have to click through those to find actual links to your personal blog and Scoutize. Why are you ok with this interaction but it's not cool for a company to do it with Tumblr?
Ah. I see what you mean. Well, I don't control the Medium flow, so I can't actually fix it, but that's not the issue.
Like I said, going from my face to my Medium profile is exactly what should be expected. Much like going to your profile on pretty much any website out there.
If by clicking on the M button I got somewhere other than the Medium front page, that would have been a valid argument for you, but I do get to Medium front page, so it isn't.
Honestly, I think you're mad if you use Tumblr for your company blog. I had it for my personal site, and it was extremely unreliable. At one point I had a popular post on Hacker News that had numerous "well, it won't load" posts attached to it.
For a personal blog that's not really so bad, but for my company? No thanks.
I agree with the problem, but disagree with the solution. When I come across an interesting blog post, I also want an obvious way to the blog's homepage to see more posts. It would be equally frustrating if I want to see more posts, and instead end up on some landing page.
While designing my startup's blog[1], I looked at a lot of other startups' blogs and noticed that most of them had the same problem the author describes. My solution was to just put a 2 line description of what we do with a link in the blog header, so it is very easy to get to either location.
yes! the main header on the Priceonomics blog originally linked our home page, but that left users stranded on blog post pages when they wanted to visit other tumblr posts quickly.
imo a link to your homepage elsewhere is a better solution
We're doing the same thing at MakeLeaps[1].
The logo (which also says MakeLeaps Blog) links to the blog's homepage and to the right we have a prominent link saying "Back to makeleaps.com".
As the logo and link are the only things in the header this works pretty well for our visitors/users.
Kirill Zubovsky - maybe more people would listen to and act on your sage UX advice if you didn't come across as such an entitled dick when you're giving it.
> It doesn’t just bother me, it infuriates me. ... When I don’t get that in 1-click, I get mad. How could you be so ignorant? Why are you expecting me to decipher your url and to type it into the browser? Why should I? You just captured my attention and then you punched me in the face!
Logo link issue aside, I'd love to host my company blog on Tumblr but have heard bad things about the SEO factor of Tumblr sites, even if you use your own blog.company.com subdomain. I have no empirical evidence of this, but anecdotally it appears to be true, so I'v been deterred.
I heard from discussions on SEOMoz blog that hosting on Tumblr doesn't give your domain the "SEO juice", but I don't actually know what that means. Perhaps your domain isn't marked as valuable when your popular posts are not hosted on your primary site. However, when your posts do get popular, they drive just as much traffic to your blog. They way I see it, it's your job to convert them over to the site itself. The "juice" value aside, Tumblr is so fast to setup that it was definitely worth it for us.
IIUC it's just that foo.com blog.foo.com do not count as exactly the same domain, so whatever bit of increased value a backlink gives to you gets split between the two domains rather than go to the same.
If the blog is under foo.com/blog, OTOH, all the link juice goes to the same domain.
Tumblr goes down so frequently for me that I don't really understand how companies can justify using it. It'll go down when you need the page to be up the most (ex: when your one hundredth blog article finally goes viral or makes it to the HN toppage)
Annoyingly, the block he mentions in step 4 ({block:IfLogoInTopBar}) isn't actually present in the default tumblr theme. I ended up doing something similar near {block:IfShowBlogTitle}
I agree with your point and find it quite disturbing myself. What punched me in my face in your article was that you asked people to comment on HN if they agreed. I quite honestly don't understand the reasoning behind this. Granted, I'm a new member on HN but asking for comments just for the sake of comments seems like broken Facebook "like"s.
Perhaps I phrased that incorrectly. Since Medium does not have a commenting system, I asked folks to leave a comment here, if they had one. Indeed, I was asking for everyone's comment, not just the ones that agreed with me. Thanks for pointing it out. Will remember to watch it next time.
I'm not sure I agree with this. People expect to be returned to the index of that website/subdomain when clicking the site logo. If you want to give blog reader easy access to your main website, do that at the end of all posts or with some sort of accented nav item.
> People expect to be returned to the index of that website/subdomain when clicking the site logo.
I'm not sure most people really understand the difference between "something.startup.com" and "startup.com", especially when the logo is the same on both.
If I click the logo of the startup, I expect to be taken to the landing page for said startup.
Agreed. There should be a link back to the home page for the blog that is not the startup's logo. The logo should go to the startup's actual home page.
Every blog page should have a way back to the startup's main site. This could be as simple as a bar at the top of each blog page that links "back to startup.com" appropriately if linking the logo doesn't work for some reason.
The same is true for support sites. If you use a 3rd party service for support or have a separate support subdomain, please please please give me a way back to your primary site.
With this approach, visitors that are viewing a blog post's dedicated (permalink) page may not find an obvious way to get back to the root of the blog as the logo links to the associated company site. To me, this can be just as annoying, since I don't want to get into manual-address-bar-truncation mode. Explicit links for each (blog root and company) in the footer are nice, but often not to be found.
Is this 100%? I need to do some crap for RSA next week and I'd strongly prefer to throw it on another host with a subdomain vs. some redirect magic, but would like maximal SEO value.
He actually does tell people how to fix it in their templates. And having a clickable logo that goes to your main site is basic advice even in very down to earth books like "Don't Make Me Think".
Tumblr customization isn't that difficult -- and I think people with a basic understanding of HTML/CSS should be able to figure out how to do something like this.
A large number of sites (including ours) have a top nav.
We changed the whole top nav on our tumblr blog to look just like the rest of the site. The user can also access any part of our site this way.
Take a look:
http://darwinapps.com/ http://blog.darwinapps.com/