Published in Web Development on Thursday, September 1st, 2005
Today Feedburner released the redesign of the back-end of this useful web-app, and the good news is that it is clear and clean.
In a teaser post, they announced the following:
We are going to be rolling out an expanded suite of services for publishers this fall. In anticipation of these new features, we have overhauled the FeedBurner user interface in order to make it easier to see and manage all aspects of a feed from a single integrated vantage point.
Followed up by todays' announcement, I headed over and was happy to see a design pattern that I have posted about before.
Much like Digital Web, they went with the tabs and arrows layout that, for me, works very well for knowing where you are and what you're up to - it will be interesting to see this panel once they roll out the new features.
My own 2 cents, it would be great if the "My Feeds" link on the top right worked more like the "dropdown-project-switcher" in Basecamp, and, it would be nice if the "Set Reporting Range" dropdown remembered what you selected as you change thru sections that have that value available (it remembers if you click from Feed Circulation > Item Stats, but not if you stop in the middle on Readership).
Hey Mike, thanks for your feedback. I totally agree with both of your suggestions -- those are things we've talked about and will hopefully be incorporating soon. Let me know if you have other suggestions or questions about the redesign!
As one who does not use the FeedBurner site very often, I found that the redesign didn't mean a lot to me personally. I do, however, really like the new look. I really like the sites that are doing the large sans serif fonts in their layouts. Flickr is another great example of this kind of work.
What I would like to see redesigned is the "ClearFeed" theme in the "BrowserFriendly" service. It is really convoluted and confusing. I tend to use the "classic" theme because I just end up staring at the other one without a clue.
Jeff,
Point taken. We're balancing some business relationships with the functional goal of making it easier to browse a feed's content and then subscribe to it on that page, and it's overdue for a refresh of some kind. Less is more.
We've also discussed, at some length, with our publishers and other partners about offering the ability to provide your own, customized XSLT/CSS combo for Browser-Friendly. I hope we can offer that capability soon, but we've got a lot of pressing demands for priority work ahead of that, I'm afraid. Still, I'm glad people are taking time here (and elsewhere) to provide feedback — we appreciate it!
Hmm, you two feedburners should get yer linkin straight!
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