Having designed blogs now for three years, I’ve seen a tonne of changes in the blogosphere - not only in software improvements, but also in the scope that blogs cover - from blogs for businesses and non-profit organisations and professional bloggers to blogging software being used as an inexpensive way to manage website content.

Here’s a few of my predictions for blog design work in 2006:

1. More businesses will jump on board with blogging, now that major players such as Yahoo! have hosted Wordpress and MovableType business blogging hosted plans. They’ll need to be able to integrate their current branding into their blog, without losing the blog’s edge. Many current traditional web developers will need to get up to speed with these platforms, or they will begin to outsource to blog design specialists. There’s always a lag time between a massive amount of hype and general business uptake - 2006 will see more and more businesses dip their toes into blogging. (And not just the tech companies.)
2. More and more non-profit organisations will also find topical blogging and podcasting a way to quickly disseminate information in times of crisis or appeal campaigns. Many will turn to specialised products such as CivicSpace (which is based on Drupal) to get them up and running. Specialists who work with Drupal will be in demand.
3. Plugin development - more commerical plugins will be written for Wordpress and MovableType, based on specialist requirements as people push the envelope with blogging software usage. Tools integrating blogging software with other systems such as Basecamp’s TaDa list will emerge.
4. Design trends: people will want blogs that “don’t look like blogs” - sites which tightly package their new content in RSS feeds but aren’t in the traditional reverse-chronological ordering. Brighter colors and larger fonts will continue to be used.
5. Everyone will want AJAX (just because it’s cool). We’ll get tired of many of the AJAX gimmicks really quickly (remember animated gifs anyone?) but the best uses will be subtle ones, such as those which make forms more usable.

No doubt you’ve read 10 Things You Should Know About Wordpress 2.0 but here’s some little things I’ve discovered that I’ll be finding incredibly useful:

1. The ability to resize your post area.
   
   I’ve hacked the default size in Wordpress 1.5.x installs so many times, because the box was never big enough and it was frustrating having to scroll around each time you clicked on a quicktag and it jumped back to the top of the box.
   Reduce your scrolling with this handy resize capability.
2. Adding categories on the fly
   
   Sitting to the right of your post area are your categories as before but now with a useful “Add” button.
3. Easy uploading
   
   Finally Wordpress ships with a simple system for uploading images without plugins! I’m loving the fact that I can upload an image while I’m writing a post, in the same window, without losing my unsaved post. For those of us who care about valid code (hopefully everyone) the images finally have width and height attributes filled in automatically. It’s easy to select whether or not to use a thumbnail too.
4. Backing up
   Wordpress now comes with a plugin for backing up your blog. Great for people who aren’t into hunting down plugins, don’t know how to use a tool like phpMyAdmin. In fact, great for everyone who needs reminding about backing up their databases. It won’t back up your theme or any plugins you’ve installed - so make sure you grab a copy of at least your theme files every so often.
   
5. Quick importing
   
   No more digging around on the server to import in entries from other blogging systems (ooh, it imports from RSS files too!).

2005 has been an amazing year for me in so many ways but I realised that I’ve missed having a creative space for me to blog about, well, designing blogs among other things. My journal had dried up as of late - it didn’t seem the right place to put thoughts on web development, sites I’m working on and so forth.

I also realised that, of the many and varied blogs I read, very few blogs on web design and development are written by women. I’m no feminist but it reminded me that perhaps I do have something valuable to add to the web design community as a young woman designer from New Zealand. Perhaps my voice could count amongst the many distinguished bloggers I read daily.

So, without further ado, I open this blog with a freshly installed Wordpress 2.0 and my inner geek appreciated the fact I was one of the first thousand to grab a copy.