Sourcebench - the web developer’s workplace

Five days after we started our experimental community based blog consulting Darren posted a first summary of the project. Over 80 responses gave me a pretty clear vision of things we need to do to make this site a better place.

Here are some of the things we already did today:

• Posting comments without registrations - done!
• "Read more" links on frontpage articles - done!
• Tag cloud readability - improved!
• Remove white space, create more contentspace - some improvement!
• Increased font size - done!

Things we will do soon:

• More structured content - content will be easier to find due to better categorization and layout
• Front page redesign - the front page will be redesigned to provide more information with a better structure. The header will get smaller and will be better organized
• Featured, most visited, most commented posts - there will be sections on the frontpage that emphasize the best posts and the handpicked ones.
• Better writing style - Sourcebench is searching for new members that will contribute better content.
• SEO - The page will be optimized for better search engine rankings.
• Code optimization - once we are done, we will re-optimize the code to be standard compliant again.
• Adding unique features - The page will get some unique features that will make it different from other "just blogs"

Overwhelmed by the feedback to Darren's post I decided to invest some more resources in this project.

The feedback we got so far was really very constructive and I am amazed about the quality of the entries. They will indeed help to make this page better. So far we got 75 comments which give me a pretty good picture of mistakes and flaws of the current version. We are already planning a relaunch of this page in the near future.

The new version will be completely targeted in one direction - providing web developers with useful information and platform for exchanging information. The design will be optimized with a strong focus on usability rather then design. Content will be king and easy to find. Some customized modules will give this page a unique set of features, that standard blogs are missing out. The posts will be additionally categorized in experience groups, so we can serve all levels of expertise. The community spirit will be improved with better socializing options and open comments without subscription. Subscribers in addition will gain access to subscriber only features such as svn (subversion) access to submit and retrieve snippets and whole scripts from the Sourcebench snippet library. In the future each subscriber can get a subversion repository and a customizable subpage on this site.

As I can hardly focus on writing articles and at the same time focus on redesigning the site and providing all this improvements, we are now searching for some additional contributors for the projects. If you are interested in contributing to this project please refer to this job post and send us your application.

After putting a lot of effort into Sourcebench i was wondering the last days what we can do to attract more visitors to this site and how we can reach a bigger readership. I am a dedicated reader of Darren Rowse's Problogger blog and as this guy was able to make blogging a profession he seemed to be the right guy to ask for advice.

I wrote a short mail to Darren and asked him to give me a little clue of what i can do to lift my blog to the blogging Olymp. I was pleasantly surprised when i really got some feedback from him, offering me to make a post in his blog in order to forward this question to his readers.

I am aware of the fact that this means that we could also get negative feedback or even being torn to shreds, but i agreed to this offer without major concerns as whatever comes out of it, it can only be good for Sourcebench. No matter which feedback we gain, we will be able to use it to make this page a better place and gain experience and thoughts of a lot of different people.

We want Sourcebench to be a community page, so the best thing we can do to reach this goal is to ask the community what they want and expect from it.

As already the introduction to this case study got some positive feedback, we are really looking forward to the responsed and will be carefully watching the comments to Darren's request for comments on Problogger.