I’ve been thinking more about blog layouts and whether or not new layouts improve things for readers.
In terms of this blog, would this layout be a more useful and helpful way to organise my blog posts:
I’d categorise my posts into three broad categories (and use tagging for the specifics): blog design (the main focus of this blog), other (technology) interests (Web 2.0, Ruby on Rails, AJAX) and my life (travel, photography, music). I have friends who want to hear about how my life is going and while I could continue on with my old blog, it’s helpful to let people know when I’m away on holiday or what I’m up to here too. Content would be organised a little like newspaper columns - I have my favourite columnists which I turn to first before glancing through the rest of the paper. Some have suggested having different pages for this - although without a front page which entices you to read this extra content, it might be easily overlooked. I give emphasis to the main focus of the blog by giving it the widest column, older posts aren’t lost in the mix so quickly and my content is more focussed.
Of course, categories provide us with these pages already - so people who’re interested in just reading about my life could just go to that page. But what if we saw category archives as more than archives, but rather like main sections of a newspaper - something we want to turn over to see, rather than old stuff that there’s just too much of to catch up on? By linking at the bottom of each of these columns to the appropriate category archive, we invite the reader to see more articles and stories like the ones they’ve just been reading.
So, would this layout be more helpful to you? Of course, if you’re a feed-reader, the corresponding question would be, would you prefer there were four main feeds for this blog (all posts, blog design, other interests, life)? (Yes, I know Wordpress has created all of these already, but making them more obvious to everyone helps.)
While I’m thinking aloud, many times I’m at a blog and I wish I could quickly hide blog post categories which didn’t interest me. We spend so much time tagging things but do we use them as filters, rather than discovery tools? Would our blog/feed reading be more efficient if we filtered on tags which were relevant to us?
your thoughts
Gareth
Some colleagues and I are looking at getting a blog built so you talking about blog design is very interesting for us. I love what this Jesse Bennett-Chamberlain has done with his blog - http://www.31three.com/go/main/play - the main column actually sits on the right, with a thinner section in the middle that contains really quick posts (perhaps akin to your other interest/life columns). It looks great, gives you something to read really quickly and then you can look more indepth at the big articles. Your eyes move from left to right through the categories, brief posts and main posts. He also built this site which has many “newspaper like” sections (http://www.macsimumnews.com). Anyway, im off to fill in your application for a blog quote
Dennis Bullock
I like the appraoch that you detailed. It gives your readers the advantage of looking at what they are interested in without having to weed through other stuff. I think of things like this all the time with my site but just havent figured the best wat to implement it yet.
Mark Bernstein
You know, your layout looks a lot like a Tinderbox Map:
http://www.eastgate.com/Tinderbox/
I mention this because there’s some very interesting work on spatial hypertext tools like Tinderbox and VKB and the way they organize space — how working with lots of box-shaped notes on a big plane creates ideas and categories more subtle than simple tags.
Prof. David Kolb (Bates) has a fascinating essay on this in progress.
It terms of Web design, the real problem is managing the vertical axis. Do you want each subsection to scroll? Probably not — the noise from all those scroll bars will be obnoxious. Does the front page become a list of headlines? Perhaps a dynamic design where mouseover expands the area you’re seeing, or a stretchtext where you can expand some items with outline-style disclosure triangles?
Another issue: RSS won’t be a great representation for your new page, because all the layout gets flattened. Do you address this by offering multiple feeds? Or some other way?
John Hamman
You also should ask yourself what width do you want to do with your layout as that may affect your overall decision.
Neon
Its a great idea, looks good on 31three also, seems many more online publishing mediums are moving over towards a newspaper style layout with everything instantly accessable. Always interesting to see how other people create with the web.
Rachel
Thanks for the links - 31three is a little similar - although I want to get rid of the traditional blog sidebar altogether. I’ve long thought that blog sidebars are just full of clutter/junk and aren’t that necessary/helpful to the casual reader. Apart from say a photo/intro to the author/blog - but that could go elsewhere (e.g. the header).
I keep coming across Tinderbox and wondering about it - but the examples look so scarily complex to me.
As for width, I think I’m tending to go towards a liquid layout - one which keeps line length readable but makes use of all the extra space. I work on a widescreen laptop and I love tools like Mint which organises content like this.
Lisa
“I keep coming across Tinderbox and wondering about it - but the examples look so scarily complex to me.”
Tinderbox does appear a bit scarily complex, but it really isn’t. You can simply open a document in it and create a note, and then another note, and then another, and decide later how (or if) to organize them. At that point you have a lot of choices, but you don’t have to choose them all! In a way, it’s like getting to create your own little custom app. (fwiw)
Love your blog, by the way. I think the newspaper-column structure may be a new trend.
Rachel
Thanks Lisa - I should give Tinderbox a go when it comes out for the PC.
I’m thinking of making the switch to a newspaper-style layout soon.
Natalie
Hi Rachel,
We pop into this blog from time to time, you’ve got some great stuff… While you’re talking about layouts, I changed our blog today and used the same footer layout as you have here. We really like the way it de-clutters the page while adding the extra info for anyone who is interested… Hope you don’t mind!
redstar
I like the one you show us here. I also like the template from http://www.geenstijl.nl
Its something differend as wel.
Mena Trott on Blog Design — cre8d design blog
[...] Select and filtered readership - different people want different views of the blog, something I touched on recently. “A big issue right now is how to take that idea in account when designing blogs”. [...]
derek
your current three column looks great.
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