Today I’ll just point you to a post over at Devlounge, titled My Design Process, by yours truly. Basically, it’s a five step walkthrough on how I tackle design projects, generally speaking.
Take a look. I’m off to watch Alice Cooper hang himself.
I’m a sucker for one column blog designs. It’s not only because the sidebar is dead (albeit somewhat resurrected), and I won’t get a ton of crappy widgets force-fed to me. No, I like the direct approach that most one column blog designs have. Straight to the point, that oh so important content I came there from.
Unless I arrived via a CSS gallery site. Then good content is just a bonus.
Unfortunately, it’s not all that common to see probloggers use one column designs. The reasons are pretty obvious.
I bet you can find more problems if you looked hard enough. Now, these things are problems, they really are. It’s hard to make money if you can’t push your services or display your ads in a good way.
So yes, one column designs are harder. They’re not impossible. You can put the footer to ingenious work, but it’s not the direct approach of the ever present sidebar.
What are your thoughts on one column designs? Pros and cons?
In my feverish state of mind at the moment (yes, I’m ill), I went online to read up on videogames. From time to time I enjoy these, lately Eternal Sonata on the Xbox 360, and at the moment it’s Super Mario Galaxy for the Nintendo Wii.
Guitar Hero 3 looks cool, I’ve got Guitar Hero 2, and I’m going to pick up the new game when I get the chance.
Another game that sounds cool is Rock Band from Harmonix, a whole band instead of just a guitar? Cool! more
I’ve proclaimed the sidebar dead, partly due to the raping widgets. That could very well be my best post opening yet, by the way, ruined only by myself wallowing in it…
Seriously, this is a problem people. The sidebar is dead, how do we bring it back?
Actually, do we want to bring it back? That’s a warranted question. Personally, I think one column blog design rocks, but it’s not always the right solution. Sometimes we need the sidebar, if nothing else but to keep search fields and things like that close at hand. And ads, as I said in the previous post.
So how can we resurrect the sidebar? more
You already know how I feel about the widget overload that are raping the blogosphere. If you don’t, read the post, or get the gist of it by my wordings - not too hard, eh?
Well, the widgets are one reason I think the sidebar is dead as a resource on a blog.
Don’t get me wrong here, the sidebar still works for search fields, category listings, subscribe options (although I doubt they’re ideal there), and advertising. But for actual content, services, promoting valuable stuff on your blog, and so on, sorry - it’s dead. more
I hate all these widgets that litter the blogosphere. Some have a purpose, like the ones from MyBlogLog, BlogRush, and Amazon’s widget ad. Others just baffle me - why would you want to have a Feedjit widget in the first place?
Do you have a bunch of widgets littering your sidebar? You need to ask yourself what you get from them. Are they driving traffic? Making your users happy? Provide features necessary for your site? And if they do add something to your visitors blog experience, is it worth slowing down loading times, maybe even braking things when the widget host is down?
Please, dear blogger, and dear blogosphere, take a moment to think about this. There’s enough litter in the blogosphere as it is.
In my opinion, all these nasty little boxes are raping the blogosphere.
They’re ruining design, have poor readability, lags my web browser, slows down loading times, and are almost always ugly. Almost none fit with the blog’s design, and most of them feels completely unnecessary.
Less is more, people.
Tony Hung over at The Blog Herald gave quite a few bloggers a real scare yesterday. It did indeed appear that Google had dropped everyone’s PageRank to zero, which would have been interested to say the least.
I believe the blogosphere is too focused on PageRank, and it’s advertising services such as Text Link Ads fault.
Personally, I’ve got nothing against buying and selling text links, it’s an ad like everything else. I do prefer relevant ads on my sites, so just because a car company wants to SEO their way to the top doesn’t mean that I want them advertising with me. At least not as long as I’ve got the luxury of advertisers lined up to take their place. more
I recently wrote about using sub-networks within a blog network. Well, today I’ll tackle blog themes in a blog network, and the issues with using a general one.
First of all, there’s no obvious winner in the battle between general blog network themes versus an unique one, both can work. I know what I prefer and recommend when asked, but that’s not the definite truth either, since situations can warrant or not warrant unique themes for every blog. So yes, that’s my default answer - your blog network’s blogs deserve a true identity, and that includes a unique theme just for them.
However, some blog networks are just too extensive to use that method. Enter the general blog themes, pimped up to fit the blog’s niche, with header graphics, color choices, and even different fonts. more
Flock 1.0 is out, and it’s branding itself as a social browser. What that means is that they’ve integrated a number of online applications and social networks in the browser, easily accessible via buttons and sidebars. You can post tweets, see what your Facebook friends are up to, upload photos to Flickr, or even post blog posts right then and there.
Sounds great, huh?
Actually, Flock is a great browser - read my review over at Devlounge, and do check it out for yourself as well.
My question, however, is if this is the future? Online applications being branded into browsers, the next logical step now that each and every social network’s got an API to connect to. And if that actually is the next step, how will this change how we browse the web?
What do you think? Is Flock 1.0 a pointer of thing to come?
According to TechCrunch, there’s rumors that the Automattic founders will make a bunch of money from the investors in the company, in response to the turned down $200m buyout offer. Good for Matt & Co. of course, I won’t begrudge anyone making money out of good products such as WordPress.com and Akismet.
However, Automattic also controls the opensource self-hosted version of WordPress, and that raises some questions:
Now, don’t get me wrong here, I’m a big WordPress fan, and Automattic have so far not done anything to piss me off. In fact, I think they’re doing a pretty good job, despite the whole sponsor links debacle, and the unfriendly designer credits talked about in the WordPress.com Theme Marketplace idea. And Akismet is great, free, and everything, so I’m committed to WordPress myself.
However, having a company running an opensource platform is scary stuff. How do you feel about this?
