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Posts tagged Blog design

Blog design and usability advice

January 7 2006
by Rachel
4 comments

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Jakob Nielsen released some blog usability tips in October 2005 and said that the biggest usability problem of blogs is that it’s hard for new readers to understand your site and trust you. To get around this he suggests:

  • About me page with a photo of yourself to help your credibility and create a connection
  • Descriptive post titles – even more important for RSS readers
  • Linking the right words so people know where they’re going
  • Highlight earlier popular posts and link back to them in later posts (few people will have read all your blog posts)
  • Categorise posts
  • Stick to a regular publishing schedule
  • Keep blog posts to a narrow topic field – or establish multiple blogs if needed
  • Use your own domain name – it looks more professional

Catalyst Design Group published a report in July 2005 on blog usability for the mainstream internet audience. Suggestions after usability testing with people who were unfamiliar with blogs included:

  • Make it clear (on archive pages as well as main pages) that the site is a blog
  • Make it clear about exactly what happens when you submit a comment – whether all comments are moderated or will appear immediately etc.
  • Explain what RSS/XML is – be aware of any language used on your site which may sound technical or foreign to non-bloggers (e.g. permalink, trackbacks)

Fireant Gazette has some further suggestions:

  • Make the font size large enough to be read comfortably
  • Don’t make the post width too wide – it’ll be harder to read
  • Dark text on white background is generally the most preferrable combination

Pretty basic advice, but when you’ve been blogging for three and a bit years, it’s easy to forget how much you’ve learnt about the blogging world and what it’s like for a non-blogger discovering your blog for the first time. It’s a good reminder to check the language you’re using (not necessarily in your posts, but around them).
One of the main things that bother me about many blogs are their sidebars – they can be incredibly cluttered and confusing. Consider moving some of the things on your sidebars (like blogrolls, favourite books/music) to separate pages (links, about me).

Blog Design Trends

December 30 2005
by Rachel
78 comments

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Here’s a summary of some of the common blog design trends out there right now which may give you some inspiration:

  • Big fonts: Gone are the days when only 11pt Verdana was cool. Big fonts for headers (and even content) are back on many blogs – such as Garrett Dimon’s blog or Whitespace (which, by the way, has recently discussed the merits of big text.)
    Big fontsWhitespace
  • Top border: a tonne of sites now have a thin top border spanning the width of the window, irrespective of the width of the rest of the design. It’s usually 5 or 6 pixels high. Examples include: A List Apart, Tech Crunch, Whitespace, GigaOM
  • Big headers/footers: Sites like Juque, Read/Write Web, Business Logs, The Hot Crew use contrasting or even subtle colours to make their large headers and/or footers stand out. These will span the full width of the window, while the rest of the content is much narrower. Big footer
  • Bright colours: Fill boxes with bright colours with a subtle vertical gradient and you get sites such as 9rules, Blinksale, Serene Green, Fruitcast.
  • Speech bubble comments: Adding a little more interest to comments as seen at hicksdesign and Digg, among many others.
  • Rounded corners: CSS techniques are making these easier to pull off and they’re turning up everywhere.
  • Highlighted links: Links aren’t underlined but their background colour is different – often a pale yellow.

I’ll add more sites that fit into these design trend categories as I come across them.

Have you seen any blog design trends lately that I’ve missed off?

Update: See this follow-up post: The Content-Rich Footer

My toolkit

December 29 2005
by Rachel
10 comments

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I used to think it was cheating by starting off a new web project by looking at some design galleries for inspiration. Not to copy, but just to get my creativity started up. Now, I realise that almost all artists, in whatever field they specialise, need to see new things regularly to keep them inspired and thinking creatively. I have a little scrapbook I snip out cuttings from magazines, rave invites, photographs, postcards and so on that I often flip through. I also have a long list of online galleries I’ll go visit – which got me thinking about my toolkit: the sites I find invaluable when creating new blogs or websites. I’m sure I’ve forgotten a few things, so I’ll be back to add to it.

For inspiration

For fonts

For images

For colours

For lists

For filler text

For checking

What’s in your toolbox that I’m missing?

Blog design predictions for 2006

December 28 2005
by Rachel
10 comments

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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.

Emerging

December 23 2005
by Rachel
4 comments

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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.

840 times

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.

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