It’s time for yet another round of the Bloggies (the site just went down - looks like someone didn’t pay their hosting bill, oops!) Voting closes at the end of the month, so be in quick. This year the best designed weblog nominees are as follows (all comments are my own):

• Kottke - the design here is so subtle and yet the splash of yellow is so Kottke’s brand. I love the header’s design, the band of colours and the text in the footer. His sidebar isn’t over the top and it’s really clear who’s blog it is immediately. I’m not so sure why a lot of the text are images (e.g. the entire intro paragraph, more links, header links). As of right now, there’s 55 validation errors but almost all of them are links with entities (e.g. &) in them. However, it seems to me that the design is rather tired… it’s looked pretty much like this for so long, I’m not sure I want it to win the 2006 award. Total page size: 152KB.
• Delicious Days - the first thing I have to say I love is the favicon! So cute! The colours and rounded photos of food just makes me want to stop and read this blog. Thought has gone into how recipes will appear - the dotted lines and indentation are nice touches. I found the search box momentarily confused (I was trying to click under Search) and if you turn off images, the top navigation disappears completely, along with the sidebars. The code validates though. Total page size: 526KB… yikes!
• Karen Cheng - I love the hand-drawn feel to the site, and it’s great to see a photo of Karen on the home page, makes it seem a friendly place and I just want to smile along with her. There’s a sense of space and lack of clutter here. It failed validation, so I’m not sure how many errors there were because it contained some weird characters somewhere on her page. Total page size: 174KB.
• Joshuaink -Aside from Joshua’s hilarious style of writing, the design is simply stunning: bright, creative, happy, mmm! One little change and the code will validate. One of the most original designs out there. Total page size: 533KB… but 123KB of it is the garden image.
• Subtraction 7.0 - there’s something classy about a largely black-and-white site and Khoi pulls it off with ease. Simple but effective. I love the way he organises all the content in a grid style. The code validates nicely. Total page size: 152KB (38KB of it is the dog photo).

My pick I’d love to see Joshuaink take out the award for such a beautiful design which stands out a mile from other blogs. Runner-up pick: for functionality and organisation, I’d like to see Subtraction 7.0 be recognised.

Last year’s winner was talented Claire Robertson’s gorgeous blog Loobylu.

What are your thoughts on the finalists?

I’ve been an avid reader of TechCrunch for a while now and enjoy keeping abreast of new Web 2.0 products and news. I’m proud to say that the TechCrunch Index is now launched. It’s a great way to search for products and companies on TechCrunch and RSS feeds are available for each tag as well.

I will release the mini-plugin I created on top of the awesome Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin to wp-plugins shortly. I’ll be working on some more projects for TechCrunch in the future and will let you know of new developments as they go live.

Someone stole a design I did for Problogger and thinks there’s nothing wrong with it. I work bloody hard on blog designs and to have my work stolen is enfuriating. He’s removed the header menu now to make it look a little different, but the theme is still the same. I’m. Not. Impressed. Right. Now.

Update: The stampede of bloggers trying to rid the world of wrong-doing succeeded today. Thanks for all the support guys.

As a follow-up to my blog design trends post, I’m feeling a need to change “big footer” to:

The content-rich footer

Instead of cluttering up the sidebar, why not remove it completely, or keep the main items on there but move everything else to the footer region, organised nicely in multiple columns?

This way, you’ll still have any important links up the top in a sidebar (or, in a top menu) and if a person has scrolled/read down to the bottom of your blog entries, they’re presented with a set of options right there to earlier content, related links etc. They’re at the bottom most likely because they’re interested in reading more. Otherwise, they’ll get to the bottom of the page, and all those sidebar links you were hoping they’d click on are most likely out of sight. They’ll have to scroll back up to see them.

Examples include:

Viatrax, If Else, Business Logs, Dennis Bullock, Andry Huzain, Juque, Ordered List, Shaun Andrews, Subtraction.

2006 will be the 5th year that I’ve been designing blogs and I’ve been reflecting on some surrounding issues. Here’s three of them for now.

• The sidebar(s) - Standard blog software’s templates are all 2 or 3 columns. Almost all blogs are 2 or 3 columns. As a result, most people want blogs designed with 2 or 3 columns. That’s ok… but what ends up happening often is that the sidebars are just filled up with stuff, just because there’s columns there. Have a good long hard look at many sidebars and ask yourself if it’s necessary to have all that extra complexity and text on the page.
  Could pages be created specifically for people wanting that information? e.g. Archives - apart from a page footer to navigate to previous posts. e.g. Blogroll - could this be on its own page along with informative descriptions as to why you like/read those blogs?
  Consider creating a fun “About me” page with update information on what you’re listening to, reading, doing… and create a teaser which randomly pulls out an item from this page on the home page.
  Don’t clutter your page with too many things other than your main message - your content.
• The individual post archive template - So much thought and effort goes into creating a nice design for the home page and usually the individual post archive template is a clone, an afterthought. Remember that for most blogs, a large chunk of traffic is via search engines or link ups where people arrive on an individual post archive, rather than on your home page. Imagine being a visitor to your blog, who’s arrived to an individual post. Is it clear they’ve arrived on a blog? Is it clear who the author is and when it was written?
• Blogspeak - So almost everyone knows what a blog is, but there’s a tonne of other in-crowd-jargon that bloggers are using constantly and, in many cases, probably unnecessarily. Remember what it was like when you first heard all of these terms… it’s a little overwhelming.
  “Syndicate”? That word didn’t mean much to me as a Kiwi. I only knew of it being something to do with TV shows in the US.
  “RSS Feed”? “XML”? What about using “Subscribe” or “Be notified of updates”? (And of course, adding the funky new standard Feed icon for those who recognise it.)
  “Permalink”? Hardly necessary - just link the title of your post to the permalink. No weird word, same functionality.
  “Blogroll”? Try “Blogs I recommend” or just plain old “Links”.
  You get the idea. Step back from your blog every so often and try and reduce the jargon for the uninitiated.

Let me know what you think of these.