I’m excited about a menu bar

The more I think on inverting the format for Advisorator’s free edition, the more confident I’m feeling about it, and a lot of that has to do with a menu bar.

Here’s what Advisorator’s top nav bar used to look like:

After some fiddling, here’s what it looks like now:

Most notably, it now has a “Subscribe” link, which leads to the free newsletter sign-up form. This might seem obvious to include, but Advisorator used to be for paying members only, and the website existed only for those subscribers.

It all got kind of awkward as I added and expanded the free edition. The site still catered primarily to paid subscribers, and so I avoided putting a sign-up link in the nav bar so as not to cause confusion. Until now, I’ve also been creating two separate newsletters, and so it made sense to only include the paid edition’s archives in the top nav bar.

The new format will make it much easier for me to have a single, canonical archive, with a paywall that applies to the bottom half (ish) of each newsletter. That means the Archives link will be useful to free and paid subscribers alike.

Meanwhile, I’ve moved the “Home” button over and renamed it to “Membership.” When you sign in as a paid subscriber, it serves as a welcome page with quick links to the latest newsletter and other resources. If you’re not a member, you’ll see an explanation of membership benefits and links to subscribe.

All of which helps make way for the aforementioned “Subscribe” button, which gives you an easy way to sign up no matter where you navigate on the site. To me at least, the whole thing feels cleaner, more transparent, and more professional. I hope it leads to more free and paid subscribers alike.

As for The Blog, this is still just a place for me to dump some excess thoughts from my head. I’m not sure that’s worthy of a nav bar item just yet.