Typepad home page I hate you!

Typepad used to be very user friendly and have great UI. I signed up more than 2 years ago only planning to use their free 30 day plan. But is was so easy to use that I've been a paying customer for more than 2 years.

This year has been the explosion of the blog. Everyone and anyone has one. And SixApart has exploded their offerings to take advantage of the market. Part of this explosion has been packing as much crap as possible on the home page - my personal home page. It's gotten to the point I'm almost ready to leave because I have to look at the same crap multiple times a day and can't configure the page to put the information that is most important to me close to the top.

Take this screenshot, which is what I see everytime I log into to post a blog or check stats (which appear to be down more than they are up - grr).

So SixApart, will you do something about this big waste of pixel space? If I want to listen to Seth Godin I would have done that already. If I gave a shit about Skype I would already be using it.

And on another note - wtf with the overwhelming plug in options. What happened to "Don't Make Me Think", clear and clean UI and ease of use? That was the whole point I stuck with you in the first place, and now you're filling up my plate with all this crap I don't care about.

Give me back my clean simple UI - or I will go use someone else.

Comments

[Broofa]

Hey, nice rant gurl, You get 'em!

As for your threat to go somewhere else (*ahem*) me thinks that's a bit hollow. By your own admission, you have two years of content on this thing. Do you _really_ want to deal with porting all that stuff over?

Too bad you don't know any good engineers to help you out with that. Oh, wait... ;-)

(actually, I don't know how easy/hard TypePad makes porting your content, but I have my suspicions.)

[heather]

porting is not that hard. I tested it out earlier this year with a wordpress blog set up on a secret staging server. I was able to export all my posts from typepad and import then (all more than 700 of them) into wordpress, including the comments....

but there are other things that keep me a paying customer... hey - are you willing to help me with some programming? ;)

[Broofa]

[Me again. Staying conspicuously silent. :-) ]

[Michael Sippey]

Hey, Heather! Your post's been making the rounds here at Six Apart, and we're working on incorporating your feedback and making it better. We've heard similar complaints from other users, so you're not alone. Stay tuned...

-Michael