Picture of the Month - August 2009

[DPNow]

Here is a summary or excerpt from an article that has just been published on DPNow:



August saw some smashing photos chosen for The Picture of the Day. Now is your chance to have another look at them and vote for your favourite.

Click read the whole article...

[devilgas]

Re: Picture of the Month - August 2009

has anything happened with previous POTM's? reason for asking is that on clicking the relevant links (going back as far as oct '08 ) they're all still open for voting.

[Julia]

Re: Picture of the Month - August 2009

Hi Dave,

All the previous POTMs have been superceded by articles announcing the winner. I apologise if it is not clear. I will go back and address it.

[Julia]

Re: Picture of the Month - August 2009

All POTM have been updated so they can now be found on The Picture of the Day Archives with a link to the particular Results page from each month's selection. I hope that helps.

[devilgas]

Re: Picture of the Month - August 2009

would it be too much to ask to have all of these comps on one page with links to the entries and to the winners?

i was trying to navigate around the content last night and the word that sprung to mind was 'random'. it was in no way easy to move between months, see which had won etc. the upside to this is that you only need have 1 set of links on the site and they'd be on a statically named page that can be bookmarked by users. new content goes to the top with older filtering down as it's superseeded.

[Ian]

Re: Picture of the Month - August 2009

Our publishing system produces monthly Archive index pages that contain linked lists to all the articles in the given category - in this case, Pictures of the Day. Here is last month's:

http://dpnow.com/2009/08/PictureOfTheDay.html

The Picture of the Month voting can only happen after the month to which it applies. We're trying to make this the month following, though we're behind schedule at the moment, but are catching up. The Picture of the Month calls for voting and results titles are being re-named to make them stand out more, but they will still be categorised with POTDs. Hope that helps.

Ian

PS, I originally answered this thinking we were discussing competitions (d'Oh!!) - but it may be useful anyway, so this is what I wrote:

On each competition page there are several links that lead to previous or, when available, later competition pages. There is also a chain of monthly indexes, though it only usually lists one or two competitions as that's roughly how many we run each month.

The winner for each competition is eventually revealed on the competitioon page of the competition that they won, but sometimes there will be a delay because we need to check that the winner really exists (you'd be surprised that we sometimes never hear back from winners when we try to contact them with the good news). As soon as that's all sorted, we reveal the winner on the closed comp page.

[devilgas]

Re: Picture of the Month - August 2009

On each competition page there are several links that lead to previous or, when available, later competition pages. There is also a chain of monthly indexes, though it only usually lists one or two competitions as that's roughly how many we run each month.

The winner for each competition is eventually revealed on the competitioon page of the competition that they won, but sometimes there will be a delay because we need to check that the winner really exists (you'd be surprised that we sometimes never hear back from winners when we try to contact them with the good news). As soon as that's all sorted, we reveal the winner on the closed comp page.

that's my point though ian, it's not easy nor intuitive to navigate between past comps (& winners) and present comps. e.g. to find potm for feb (randomly chosen example), i start with the current link of august. nothing there for previous months. try the features link. nothing there except sept 2009. try that. find a link for potm june & july. click that, find links to potm for apr 09, nov 08, may 09, mar 09, dec 08. try mar 09 as that's close....yeah! feb 09 link is there.
so, to get to feb 09 it's taken 6 clicks from the current potm article.
if you have a potm / potd etc meta page then all of this frustrating run-around can be avoided.

a rule i use is that any primary content on any site i produce must be a maximum of 2 clicks away. after this, users simply can't be bothered.

[Julia]

Re: Picture of the Month - August 2009

Hi Dave,

Thank you again for your comments. You will be pleased to read that there is now a Picture of the Month - Results page with all the POTMs listed in one place. I will add the link onto the POTM individual pages and the POTD pages from now on.

[devilgas]

Re: Picture of the Month - August 2009

certainly getting better, but i still maintain a dedicated, permanently located link should be on the front page / side menu. likewise, to get from a POTD article to POTM there's still a degree of searching & random clicking involved. the 2 POT?... comp types are intrinsically linked yet moving from POTD to POTM is still difficult.
i'm guessing that the 'problem' lies with the auto publisher that is used on the site?

got a few more suggestions, but probs best to not dicuss them in an open forum.