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Serial Ezine Archives
By Brian Alt

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An Ezine-Tips reader recently wrote:

Looking for some new (or old) promotion ideas, I flipped through the archives on Ezine-Tips.com about promotion. I noticed several series on promotion, and I started reading them. When I got to the bottom I was disappointed to see no link to the next part in the series.

Now, I'm sure you're using a nice content management system that keeps your archives on a date-delineated database. I surely recommend that for your sanity if nothing else. But there's nothing to link it through. If I really want to read your content (and I do, because it's good), I'll hit the back button, scroll up, and go to the next article.

This is something all of us as ezine editors and publishers should remember: we need to make our sites as accessible as we can to new viewers. Things that seem intuitive to those of us building sites can be utterly impossible to figure out to someone who hasn't spent hours building code. =)

Just a thought,
Geof F. Morris
http://www.TOTK.com/

Geof, if subscriptions to Ezine-Tips weren't already free, I would definitely give you a free subscription for sending in some of the most helpful feedback over the last few months. Thanks!

You bring up an excellent point. While most of the articles on Ezine-Tips provide links to relevant _previous_ articles, most of them do not (yet) provide links to those in a series of articles that come _after_ the article. The reason for this is easy to see: When these tips go out in the email version it's impossible to link to the future articles because they haven't been published yet.

The Web archives, however, are permanent, and readers going back through the old articles expect a link to the next article in a series. It's an extra step in the archiving process, but well worth it from a usability standpoint to go back through the archives on a regular basis and link up article series.

Alternately, you might provide links on every page of your ezine archives to the "next" and "previous" articles. You could even go back regularly to your archived articles and add links at the end of the article to "related" articles, regardless of whether they were published before or after the article in question.

I no longer maintain the Ezine-Tips.com Web site or archive the articles, but I've passed this suggestion along to the person who does so that we can improve the usability of the Web site. For those of you who publish articles in a series, you may want to consider doing the same thing :)

Ezine-Tips for February 23, 2001

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Serial Ezine ArchivesBy Brian Alt

Serial Ezine Archives
By Brian Alt