Every hurdle a user has to hop through to get to the meat of what they’re trying to do on your site is another opportunity for them to opt out.
Lazy registration, where you get the minimum possible (dead link to webjackalope) from your users and get more information form them as time goes on, is where it’s at (in fact, increasingly technologies like OpenID and OAuth might even make lazy registration redundant).
As people who tune in regularly to the blog may be aware, the main site for Amnesty International was completely redesigned last year and launched on Dec 10th human rights day.
Since then, and with the advantages the underlying Drupal, CiviCRM, and Alfresco core technologies have given us (though we’ve had quite a few problems with alfresco since launching), we’ve been able to do quite a bit more than we were ever capable of doing before with the old platform and made some fundamental gains with the site.
Interesting weblog post on the design philosophy behind MarsEdit beta , which has become my blog weapon of choice (much better than ecto IMHO). Basically, the UI philosophy was blogging like sending email.
It’s interesting, but misleading in terms of actual usage, because I think of MarsEdit as a blog management tool though do use it for posting from NetNewsWire and Firefox> (I use MacJournal 2.6beta5 for writing and posting much of the time). I’m not necessarily a normal user, but still. MarsEdit is great for adding in pix though which is a feature still missing from MJ.