Six Apart’s new blogging service, Vox, is not what I expected. I thought it’d be simple, clean, fast, and easy. It’s not.
A few colleagues asked me for some help – they are going to be setting up a blog for a project. I thought I’d check out Vox because I knew that it allows posts to be private.
- First problem: no online tour. So I had to sign up for the service just to check it out. In other words, I married the girl before dating her even once. That sucks.
- Second: no Safari support. I usually use Flock, but my colleagues are much more likely to use Safari.
- Third: nasty interface. When you’re viewing your own blog and are logged in, you get a pilot’s dashboard with links all over the place.
- Finally: seems slow to refresh, slow to switch pages.
When you’re in the private, publishing parts of the blog, your main navbar still has links to Explore and other public, social pieces of Vox.
Not impressive! I’ll stick with WordPress, thanks.
Update: WordPress.com (the hosted WordPress) has privacy features too. Excellent!
[tags] vox, 6apart, blog, wordpress, flock, john koetsier [/tags]
Actually, we’ve got a tour, though (obviously!) we should make it easier to find, but it is a featured link right in the center of our company homepage.
Safari is supported for everything except composing posts — they know that they don’t support some key authoring technologies, but that should be fixed by Apple’s team soon.
The links to the social parts of Vox are displayed consistently throughout the site for the same reason that (for example) Flickr lets you get to your friends’ photos when you’re looking at your own: staying connected to your neighborhood, friends, and family is the whole point. But I do definitely take your point if Vox feels slow to you; the service is still pretty young and we’re always looking for ways to improve peformance.
You might also want to note that the privacy levels you’ve described for WordPress.com are nothing like what Vox offers: Vox lets you control reading permissions on individual posts as well as on the photos/videos/items that might be inserted into those posts. And those controls are granular enough to let you limit access to your just your friends and/or family, or to the whole world. Plus, Vox’s privacy never costs you money, no matter how many friends you have.
Thanks for the feedback on Vox, I hope you’ll give it another look, and that hearing a slightly different perspective helps you find it a useful complement to this blog. As far as the overall user experience goes, compare inserting one of your private (friends-only) Flickr photos or a YouTube video into this blog and into your Vox blog, and see which one feels more fun. 🙂
Thanks for the comment, Anil.
Are you saying the “Explore” thing is a tour … ’cause otherwise, I’m not seeing it. Front page does look different today, with the number options, but I still don’t see a tour.
http://tour.vox.com
Whoops, sorry, I meant to say the tour is linked on the sixapart.com homepage, we definitely need to get that a lot more prominent on the Vox site as well.