Blog designs are so… monotonous and boring
by Stii
I’ve been thinking about the way our blogs and templates look for a loooong time. It is boring. Even the best looking WordPress blogs like Matt Mullenweg and Sue Rutherford‘s blogs (which are fantastic designs) is, or rather become, boring. It might not be boring the first or second time you visit it, but after a while you don’t even notice the design anymore, not true?
Why then do we stick with our same old boring templates post after post? Can you imagine you buy your favorite glossy magazine and page through it only to see every single page looks exactly the same? Yes, you may argue “…but print is dead!”. Newsflash! Our medium is boring. I’ll rather be dying than be boring. So why do we refuse to draw on years of research on design? When we were still based in Media City in Cape Town amongst the magazines I talked to a couple of the editors and I basically wanted to know how they design their look and feel? It turns out that it is a science. You may think they only take a bunch of words, slap in a bunch of good looking pictures and BAM! Print it, ship it. No, not quite… A lot of thought goes into the design and layout of individual articles. I’m sure not all magazines take that approach, but basically the good ones do.
Don’t get me wrong. I think theme designers out there do a great job at making themes unique and very pretty. Awesome job guys! It is just that if you read it regularly, it becomes boring. Have a look at Dustin Curtis‘ blog. That is an amazing way of doing articles on a blog! It is definitely a step in the right direction.
Have a look at some of his posts and you’ll get the idea. The post is the main focus, as it SHOULD be. No sidebar. There should not be one IMHO. Looking at my stats (not that I think that is anything to go by) a very small amount of clicks goes to sidebar links. VERY SMALL. So what is the point? No, point. Yes, it sucks at the moment, but even before this crappy design it had very little clicks.
Now people that know me would agree that I’m a crap designer. Doing posts like Dustin’s would require that you not only put thought into your writing, but also your post layout and design! What a bloody mission, I’ll admit, but it may well be a worthwhile mission. Lets try and see.
I love Dustin Curtis’s blog post designs. I think the oracle of this sort of blog post design is Jason Santa Maria though – http://www.jasonsantamaria.com/
Awesome idea uniquely designing each blog post, but it sure means a lot more time writing each post!
Great post, ek stem saam. Dit help nie die layout is nie funksioneel en conducive to reading nie.
Hey Mark, that is a concern, although I think I’d do it for essay type posts or for posts I put a lot of research and thought into (which doesn’t seem to happen all that often lately…). I think this normal blog would become like my Twitter stream for when I want to break out of the 140 char limit. I’m playing with some ideas.
Thx Johan. Ek dink deur dit meer visueel stimuleerend te maak kan dit soveel meer trefkrag hê. Dit raak half sieldodend om ‘n lang post te lees wat boring uitgelê is. Ek is geen kundige op die gebied nie. Dus sal dit weereens ‘n eksperimentele oefening wees :P
Cool idea – I can definitely see it working on some blogs … oh to have the time to do that!
You ask us to imagine buying our favourite magazine and flipping through it and seeing the same things over and over, well think of it this way.. Imagine the company which produces the magazine changed their branding each time, how’d you know which magazine is your favourite anymore? See the frame/look of the website as the branding and see the content as the area which changes, you can’t continually change your brand – that would work negatively against you.
Expanding on this, take 3 copies of your favourite magazine and look through them, you will see the same design elements from issue to issue, whether it’s a colour used for a specific section or the way the titles are designed, they’ll be repeated each time, it’s only the content and photography which actually changes. Why? Branding.
Sorry Stii, I don’t agree with you at all, mind you, what do I know about blogging ;)
I’m not disputing branding. Yes, true, there are some elements carried through all the time. I’m not saying there shouldn’t. If you have a look at Dustin’s site you’ll notice that he carries it through in his header and footer. From what I could understand from the editors and magazine people I talked to they spend a great deal (both time and money) on their design to get the balance right between branding and unique or interesting design.
You certainly cannot claim that every page in the three magazines you picked up looked exactly the same?! Elements may look the same, but layout, typeface and images differ. Why should blog posts be much different?
I guess that is what makes blogging fun. No concrete rules. We’ll see what the future holds. I’m planning to take this route since I do fancy it.
I think a magazine is a bad example to use for comparison purposes though – What needs to be defined is whether we’re talking about blogs run by one author or multiple authors? That said, it would appear that we’re talking about single author blogs, whereas magazines are multi editor mediums, which makes all the difference in terms of content shaping.
So what do you propose should happen? And secondly, what do you think _will_ happen?
Well, I’m still giving it a lot of thought since this could easily be applied to a single author blog as you said. If we talk about a thought leader type model it *is* a completely different story altogether.
Another obstacle is that this model would work for technical minded people, sure. People with zero HTML/CSS skills would simply not be able to do it with the current tech.
Yet another problem is that if it is not done “right” it could look terrible. If you know what I mean? I don’t think it is necessarily easy to do this. I guess we’ll see shortly if I can…
Technically, WordPress is absolutely brilliant. Problem is, we’ve got all the tools and technology to build rich internet applications, yet we’re not doing it. Sure the tools are a bit arcane still, but that should be developed to make it much more accessible. I think that time is about right for blogging to evolve to the next level. Since I started blogging nothing much changed. It is time…
What will happen? Hmm… I’m always hesitant to speculate on the future of things, but what I can say is that we’re seeing more and more how the software industry turns back to (almost) ancient tech to apply it in a new innovative way (think about XMPP, Pubsub, SaaS, etc…). I think on the design front we’ll see the same. We’ll turn to the successful, proven ways they designed magazines and apply our rich media to it to make it better.
What I do find astounding is magazine’s websites. If I were a magazine’s editor I would have applied the same design principles to my blog/website, yet that does not seem to be happening. Opportunity maybe?
Since I worked for magazines for 5 years of my life I think I can add some input. Magazine design is a science but it is one that is followed to a tee when it comes to production. Chris is right in most of what he says and the truth is that the only real flexibility, or out the box type design, is done for the cover feature. For the rest of the mag the pages all have templates and you work within those boundaries. Taking it even further, typefaces are never adapted. Mags normally have 2 or 3 approved typefaces and they’re not allowed to go outside of that scope. They’re not even allowed to change colours drastically either.
That all said, I agree with Stii on this. We become oblivious to design and that’s why a Mag will redesign every year. They would do it more but the costs in redesigning are enormous.
From my perspective there is ZERO way I’m going to do different look and feels for my blog. It would take too much time and TBH I don’t see the point. Stii, you could argue this post is not only about blogs but also about websites. At best, websites only get redesigned once a year and we accept that. To me there’s more important things to worry about because let’s face it – people read your blog because of your content, not the look or lack thereof.
That would be your prerogative. Your choice to do it or not to do it. Yes, it is about your content. Why not combine visual stimulation with your already great content? Surely it makes sense? I’ve read fantastic articles on sites with NO styling whatsoever! I just think if it was done in a less boring way, it would have been even better!
i’d like to try this someday. It’s a great idea although it will make posting 10-20 articles a day somewhat harder
lol, no it would definitely not be easy! i was thinking of doing this for a once or twice a week type of blog. More essay type posts.
Great posts. And soon :wink:
For that very reason one should not be too bothered by what a blog looks like, but rather with the content. Imagine if you had to change the look all the time to suit all people. That would just not be a viable solution. If Matt does that we’d never see WordPress 3!
No ways, I’ve long moved past the ‘design is super-duper important’ thing. Content remains king. And a photo or two per post makes a huge difference too.
I think this must be a common web designer issue. They look at their own designs, or friends’ designs, and think, “Oh no, all of it looks the same! What to do!” Relax. The people visiting your sites are from different walks of life, with different backgrounds. Unless they’re designers, they probably don’t go around checking if all your work looks the same.
I think you’re wrong. I think there will be a huge shift to the importance of design. Its just a matter of streamlining the process.
Au contraire, my friend! The last thing I’ll call myself is a designer. It has nothing to do with that. I’m much more concerned about the evolution of blogging than I am with designs.
Look, I’ve spent some time hacking wordpress last night and will be done today with this new experiment. Then I’d start publishing and I can already vouch that it would NOT take up much more time than a normal blog post. Okay, given that I know HTML/CSS does make a huge difference, still, it could very easily become a norm if the tools are streamlined to make it more accessible to normal bloggers.
True, but if more people do posts this way, they will start noticing. The reason they don’t notice is because the perspective is one sided. I.e. there is nothing different to measure it against.
Take a look at most high traffic websites, they’ll have a lot of fresh content going live daily, let’s say 10-50 articles a day, what happens with sites like these?
If it is a high traffic website with 10 to 50 articles a day one have to assume that it is written by a bunch of authors. These authors put a lot of thought, time and effort (hopefully) into their articles. If this is the case and they value their content, what difference would an extra 10 or 20 minutes make to prettify the article? If the process is fairly streamlined I cannot see what the issue would be. So what is the problem?
Even sites like Thought Leader could do it. They have an editorial process. If they hired the right editor with a bit of web savvy that could transform the articles they edit and sprinkle a little life over it, then why the hell not?
IMHO if you value your content the presentation thereof should reflect it, no? The focus should be the content, not the site’s header or frame. Make the site interesting by spicing up the very thing you want people to focus on rather than the packaging it came in, would you not agree?
Why do I get a distinct feeling that I’m being misunderstood? I’ve spent one night hacking an example together and it is virtually ready. I should be able to have it ready by tomorrow and I’ll try and do my first two articles by Thursday to give you a better idea. It really is not that much work. I’m not redesigning the entire site every time, I’m merely spending a little more time on individual articles by lacing it with some CSS and sprinkling little WordPress custom field magic over it. Its not rocket science and it could quite easily be streamlined.
What i’ve learned is that content is not king. Design and layout will make or break a site, this is not always the case but counts for a growing and new site
“extra 10 or 20 minutes”, geeez, how quickly do you code ;)
evl, then all the more reason to do this?
LOL, no man! Essentially one shouldn’t have to code anything. 10 or 20 minutes is what it should take *if* the tools are good and working… ;)
*hugs*
It’s still guna take a huge amount of time creating a design each time, unless you could use textures from a resource or something like that, essentially you’d need an, almost, synthasite system..
Ja dis mos wat ek bedoel het :)
Maybe Vinny saw this coming and this is part of his business model… ;) I’m fishing here
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