I've been doing this Poll Position thing for a couple of months now, and it's just occurring to me that 99% of the polls are either about the Presidential campaign or the look and feel of this blog. I'm not sure whether this is a good thing or not.
Either way, last week's poll was about the recent redesign of AB.com. As you know, I've wrung my hands over the low budget appearance of my site since the day this blog started, but I've been hesitant to change it, mostly because I'm lazy. I even toyed with the concept of porting AB.com over to WordPress, until AverageOlderBrother told me how stupid an idea it was. It's like buying a new house because you don't like your furniture. Buying new furniture makes more sense. So, I bought new furniture last weekend, in the form of an extensive redesign to make this site look WordPressy without actually leaving Blogger.
The early feedback was brutal. You guys hated the font, hated the colors, hated the text area size, some even hated the Shirley Chisolm banner image, which is befuddling in ways words can't begin to describe.
I was thinking about crying in my cereal after all the time spent on this redesign going back to the old furniture, but then it occurred to me that some of the feedback was actually constructive. I went into my bag of HTML tricks and broadened the post area size, changed the font, increased the white space, added some color, and voila, you've got the new and improved AB.com! And while the new look was getting crushed in the polls early on, the final tally (44% for, 42% against) shows that most of you more or less dig it now, so I'll take that as a co-sign.
I've quietly snuck in some new features along with the revamp. The AverageNation™ Diehards widget allows you to "follow" the blog. There's a new RSS feed with the latest Presidential Poll results. I will probably run two editions of Poll Position each week now. The banner images, contrary to popular belief, are not random, I manually change them at my whim. There's about 20 of them now, each showing some "average" bro or sis that's contributed to this great ball of wax we know as Black America, be it bad (Kwame Kilpatrick), good (Rosa Parks), or indifferent (Wilt Chamberlain), along with a famous quote from each.[1] And best of all, there are fewer ads.
You talked, I listened, we all win in the end. Welcome to the new AB.com.
In other Poll Position news, Joe Biden (87%) dusted off Sarah Palin (11%). No real surprise there.
This Week's Poll is all about the two women making historic runs for the White House this year. If you don't know about Cynthia McKinney's Green Party bid, read up before voting.
Question: What do you think of our new features and banner images?
[1] If you know a historical figure worth of their own banner image, holla at me, and I'll make one for them.
Monday, October 6, 2008
Poll Position: The New Look Is Staying. Biden Wins.
Tags Popped: Poll Position
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