Your Tumblr is broken. Fix it.
medium.com
medium.com
Tumblr customization isn't that difficult -- and I think people with a basic understanding of HTML/CSS should be able to figure out how to do something like this.
A large number of sites (including ours) have a top nav.
We changed the whole top nav on our tumblr blog to look just like the rest of the site. The user can also access any part of our site this way.
Take a look:
But you absolutely need to have your web developer integrate it properly with the rest of your site. Pointing the DNS over to the blogging service is a fine little trick for making everything look professional, but it is not half as important as making the blog feel like it's part of your website.
Posting this mainly because I hadn't realized how much Tumblr customizes their mobile experience--not sure what a good solution to this is if a sizable percentage of your readers are on iOS.
A surprisingly low amount (5%) of our readers are on iOS, but maybe it's in part because of the experience.
I also didn't realize how big of a crowd was interested in even the simplest tumblr blog customization, judging by how long this post sat in the #1 spot on HN.
Perhaps we'll customize our mobile tumblr as well, and do a nice little write-up on how to customize both to match your "real" site :)
How is understanding that clicking on a face in medium does one thing any different than understanding that clicking on the header in a tumblr does something else?
The equivalent of a Tumblr logo on Medium would be their "M" logo. When you click that, you end up on their front page, and not on my profile, which is what you should expect.
You are partially correct, this implies that the user understands the basic behavior of the web and expects my photo to lead to one place and "M" to another.
The point, correct me if I'm wrong, of your post was that a company's logo on their Tumblr blog should go to their own website and not to the root of their Tumblr blog. Yet, because your blog is on Medium it's ok that none of the titles go to your homepage?
I want to find out more about you. I click on your picture, it takes me to a profile on Medium, which links to your about.me profile and your twitter profile (and mentions a twitter handle for Scoutize). I then have to click through those to find actual links to your personal blog and Scoutize. Why are you ok with this interaction but it's not cool for a company to do it with Tumblr?
Like I said, going from my face to my Medium profile is exactly what should be expected. Much like going to your profile on pretty much any website out there.
If by clicking on the M button I got somewhere other than the Medium front page, that would have been a valid argument for you, but I do get to Medium front page, so it isn't.
For a personal blog that's not really so bad, but for my company? No thanks.
While designing my startup's blog[1], I looked at a lot of other startups' blogs and noticed that most of them had the same problem the author describes. My solution was to just put a 2 line description of what we do with a link in the blog header, so it is very easy to get to either location.
imo a link to your homepage elsewhere is a better solution
As the logo and link are the only things in the header this works pretty well for our visitors/users.
Is this a joke?
1. Headers don't come with h1 or h2 tags out of the box.
2. Title tags default to the title of the blog rather than the title of the blog post.
3. blog.domain.com does divert some SEO juice from the main domain. [1]
I wrote a short post on some of these issues that you can read up on below. [2]
[1]: http://www.seomoz.org/q/blog-on-subdomain-vs-subdirectory-be...
[2]: http://wadefoster.net/post/43633476838/three-quick-wins-for-...
I'm not sure most people really understand the difference between "something.startup.com" and "startup.com", especially when the logo is the same on both.
If I click the logo of the startup, I expect to be taken to the landing page for said startup.
Every blog page should have a way back to the startup's main site. This could be as simple as a bar at the top of each blog page that links "back to startup.com" appropriately if linking the logo doesn't work for some reason.
The same is true for support sites. If you use a 3rd party service for support or have a separate support subdomain, please please please give me a way back to your primary site.
It's more likely that you drive traffic from SEO than from Tumblr 'reblogs'.
Hence, you shouldn't even use tumblr for your main corporate blog.
Any chance you could clarify this?
[1]: http://www.seomoz.org/q/blog-on-subdomain-vs-subdirectory-be...
Thanks a lot.