Posted by Toby A Inkster on 04/04/07 08:53

James Hutton wrote:

> Currently I've got the dates in reverse order, ie, the oldest
> at the bottom of the page and the latest at the top of the page. I did
> this so that regular visitors wouldn't have to scroll down each visit.
> Although on one level this seems the most "intuitive" I wonder what
> other people would do?

Ah, there's the rub. Certainly most blogs and such have their newest
material at the top, so that it what people are probably most used to.

However, there are a fre blogs that I read very frequently -- so if I want
to read the articles in date order, I need to skim down the page to find
the last article I read on my previous visit, then scroll up the page to
get to each new article. If one particular article is fairly long, then
I'll need to scroll down slightly to read to the end of it. So
oldest-first certainly has its advantages too, and that's what most
web-based forums use, so people shouldn't find that too confusing either.

Whichever way you choose, I'd suggest including an RSS or Atom feed of
your articles. That way, if people read your site regularly, and don't
like the order you've chosen, they can use their feed reader to present
the articles in a different order.

--
Toby A Inkster BSc (Hons) ARCS
Contact Me ~ http://tobyinkster.co.uk/contact
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