5 Things That Would Make Thought Catalog Better
While we don't need an extravagantly fancy design, it wouldn't hurt to add just a little bit of style and color to make it look a little more interesting to help readers want to stay longer and visit often.
There are many things that make Thought Catalog interesting and fun to read. The articles that contributors submit are a combination of thoughtful, informational, entertaining, and sometimes controversial. We know that one of the things that makes popular media stay in the limelight is that is keeps striving to make improvements. They will make changes here and there to fit the needs of their audience.
I started thinking about what changes could be made to Thought Catalog that would overall improve readability and probably attract more page views and unique visitors in the process.
A better looking design – The look and feel of Thought Catalog is pretty simple, which is good in a way because it places focus on the articles. While we don’t need an extravagantly fancy design, it wouldn’t hurt to add just a little bit of style and color to make it look a little more interesting to help readers want to stay longer and visit often.
Separate content by section – Pretty much all the articles are thrown together in one giant list based on when they were submitted. There is currently no systematic order to filing through content besides searching through tags. It would be nice if there was a sidebar where readers could easily find the type of articles they want by clicking on categorized subject matters.
More topics per page – Currently Thought Catalog only displays five articles per page. As a reader, this is a slight inconvenience because the less clicking that needs to be done to get to desired content, the better. It wouldn’t hurt to have a few more articles on every page that what we have now. Yes, internet browsers are lazy and they have ADD when it comes to this kind of stuff.
Staff picks – It would be pretty cool if Thought Catalog featured a favorite article to pin at the top of the page each week. This could spotlight some of TC’s excellent writers as well as inspire other writers to submit quality content.
To editors: A better selection process – I’m not an editor, so I don’t know what guidelines they do or don’t have in selecting which articles make the cut and which ones they pass on. Sure, I get that “all thinking is relevant,” but does that mean that all thoughts should be published? We can all agree that there has been some questionable content of various sorts over the years, and while I don’t condone censorship, I am just saying that it would help Thought Catalog to have standards of some kind and raise the bar, maybe just a little, about the quality of content that gets published. 
