| Although content is king, there is a lot to be said for pushing the envelope when it comes to design. With CSS Grid and other delights of HTML5 I think that anyone wanting to write true 'evergreen' content needs to consider document structure more, so article, aside, figure, nav and all of these other tags get used. I am currently working on a project with high resolution images and a 'deep zoom' OpenSeaDragon viewer for these images. Why would I want to limit myself to a platform or a CMS that does not allow this advanced presentation? I just tried a Chrome Lighthouse audit on a typical Medium post: https://medium.com/dialogue-and-discourse/the-titanic-was-on... And the time to interactive given was 19 seconds for mobile. That is a bit silly. Evergreen content should not be dependent on another platform, it should rank well if the document structure is really good, plus if the content is actually there and people read it. I see no evidence of well crafted HTML5 documents trouncing clickbait blog content on Google but I don't think it has been tried, everything is a 'sea of divs and class tags' and not putting document structure first. However, if I was wanting to write something that still was relevant in 2028 then I would have to consider how the web would be crafted then and it won't be a 'sea of divs'. it depends also on whether comments matter, we all know from HN that the comments are here and not there when it comes to useful articles, even if they are on a prestigious site. For an evergreen article do you necessarily need discussion and comments? If people are just learning how to take something apart and fix it then they are just needing to takeaway that knowledge, not go writing about it. If writing about some aspect of Brexit then that would be something you might want comments about. Really you need others to be writing about your content, with link to the original article, not having them rip it off verbatim. But people that copy aren't necessarily going to rank as well if they are not using screen reader HTML5 and, if you do have something like a deep zoom tool to tell the story then they cannot rip off the content for that very easily. Most writers though are quite okay with stock Wordpress or other CMS and some lightly modified them from somewhere. Actually that is too much effort and hence the success of Medium et al. |