It is soon going to be 5 years since LiveFromALounge started its journey from being the first Indian blog about miles and points, to becoming an almost comprehensive portal to inform you on an almost daily basis about the ongoing happenings in the world of loyalty programs, aviation, passenger experience and government policy…amongst other things that could affect your travels, if you are a business or leisure traveller.
We’ve come a long way, and the current design really does not hold very well in my opinion for us to be able to disseminate information in the way we’d like to present it to you. As readers and the happenings in the market become evolved, we need to evolve too. And so, we are planning an overhaul pretty soon. While I have my own ideas, I’d also like to hear from my readers on pain points and their suggestions about how to make things better for you around here.
Technologically, we still stay the same a bit under the hood. With BoardingArea investing a massive amount of time and effort in reorganizing things at the backend, we are faster and snappier than earlier in terms of delivering contents over to you. WordPress continues to remain one of the most effective platforms for Content Management, and I am also committed to that as a platform.
A few things I’d love to hear your thoughts on, apart from everything else you think is required, are here:
The Masthead
Yes, the Journey is still the Reward. It always will be. But I do feel the need for a new logo. Something that can be introduced on more surfaces and stands on its own. What do you guys think?
Q&A
I frequently try and answer many questions that are put across to me. However, I do notice readers helping each other out as well. So how to organise Q&A in a searchable format and help it thread even better?
Trip Reports
I love bringing my experiences to you, but I suck at organizing it. How do you recommend we go about organizing the trip reports?
Comments
I try and answer as many questions posted in the comments, however, the current static system seems to be growing a bit out of hand. Do you think there is a better way out there? I know about Disqus, but does something else work as well?
Time is short however, because I’m trying to kick off the reorganization project this week along with the tech and design team at BoardingArea. So, look forward to hearing all your inputs and hopefully putting them in action shortly!
Give us an option to add pictures along with our comments. For eg. If someone wants to show a letter received from a bank, proof of fee reversals,two cards they hold from the same bank(which unusually doesn’t allow the same),etc.
Although the website is mobile friendly, there’s too much scrolling to be done.
Please move the option to comment above the comments(like you did for the reader questions) and not at the end because that involves too much scrolling.
About organising the trip reports- put them on a map. If there are 4 in Rajasthan I’ll see immediately and don’t have to wade through the other ones, say from Europe. Overall a map based experience would make it awesome and true to the globetrotting nature of the content
Keep it up man
The biggest improvement for me would if you let RSS readers pick up complete posts instead of just a summary. I use feedly to track all the travel blogs I follow, and I end up skipping most of your posts (unless the headline really jumps out) because it needs an extra click to get to it.
@aarjee that is in the hands of boardingarea, and since the only revenue BA makes out of this is advertisements, I’d appreciate if you click through 🙂
I see your point about the ad revenue but not so sure about boarding area. I follow others on this site too (OMAAT, View from the Wing) and their entire posts do show up in readers.
Ajay, Whatever you do, you do amazingly. I dont miss even a single thread of yours. What I have learnt from is beyond counting.
A big thank you for your sincere efforts.
Cheers!!!
WP has various Q+A plug ins. PointHacks uses Sabai if you check that out.
Disqus is generally seen as a dog which drastically slows loading times and reducs comment volumes.
Hi Ajay,
Since you mentioned that the Q&A has gotten more traffic with users pitching in, how about setting up a LFAL forum with threads on key topics (major airline programs, top credit cards, lounges) and user generated topics so that the community can pitch in along with your knowledge, and you don’t have to answer each question that comes your way
@AJ,
Here comes my favorite part. I will be sharing(in different parts) all those changes that I would recommend . One of them is the AdRoll advertisements that appear on your website.
As you are blogging since long time you may try your hands on Vlogging too. Instead of writing trip reports you can come with video capturing the places and edit them later to make a trip report or may be Live video through facebook. Just an idea!!