please empty your brain below
I think almost every blog I've been reading for a long time has overgone a design change apart from mine and yours
I would rather concentrate on keeping the content fresh and interesting than improve the design on my blog - after all I'm NOT a designer!
If people are really so bothered by how something looks, they really shouldn't be looking at it.
Incidentally, in the mini Euro blogmeet I was at last night, we were discussing your blog at some length and one of the bloggers said he didn't like your black on grey design and yet he was fascinated by your blog and whenever he read it, spent half an hour reading it. So reluctantly he agreed that the design of your blog didn't stop him from reading it. Plus so many people read blogs in RSS readers right now the design hardly matters.
People's (IMO) rather lame arguments about design, are that it might make a few more people read it (unless they blog is in simply unreadable clashing colours), but my counter argument is after a while people completley forget the design of blogs and visit for the content.
Phew
I suppose I could follow D4D and allow readers to choose their own colour scheme, but I wouldn't know how to code it.
Like you say, content is definitely more important than design.
There does come a point where bad design deters people from reading a blog's content, but hopefully black on silver is just bearable enough...
Of course, it also makes it more accessible - you don't have to sod about with different widths for people viewing on a PDA or a mobile phone, for example.
Cheers for the plugs/links, by the way!
Mind you, having recently bought a laptop with a wide monitor screen, I must confess that even I get a little fed up with all the acres of wasted space on many sites . . .
Anyway - I beg to differ on the point about content and design being too separately manipulatable(?) parts of the experience. OK - they can be manipulated for sure - but there is a "brand" element to the pages that is made up of both these things. Sum of the parts if you will. It's what makes Diamond Geezer what it is. If you were to change your design to a narrowblog format - then it wouldn't be Diamond Geezer. Perhaps I'm talking rubbish - but like Annie's anecdote above - I, too, personally don't like the design here - and I have to admit that there are some aspects of the content that I don't like either (nothing personal or anything) - but I, too, am compelled to come here daily (or even twice daily) to read and admire. As an example - just look at how beautifully, gracefully, crafted your "just surfed in" links on the right hand side are - I can't help but admire that every time I come here. That's just one thing - there are too many others to list here. It's not necessarily about content OR design - I think it's both.
The other reasons? Control freakery (cf. Vaughan above) laziness (mine's a modified Blogger template) and fear (what if it looks crap)?
At least neither of us suffer from the most irritating design flaw of them all, which seems to happen most often on Movable Type sites: when the whole sidebar drops right down to the bottom of the page, because it won't fit side by side with the main column. I hate that, I do!
hubel.sfasu.edu/research/AHNCUR.html
www.humanfactors.com/downloads/oct02.asp
BTW I don't think that Jag's design has changed that much over the years too - although I think his comments area looks different.
In the current blog there is no-auto-resizing done - it's all left-justified - with two link-bars in the right - and no popup-window for comments any more.
he main reason for these changes was to allow convenient viewing on a PDA or mobile phone - you will find that most PDA and mobile phones do not support pop-ups - and it's also a real pain to be doing horizontal scrolling on mobile devices - so with my current blog being left-justified you never need to do horizontal scroll if you visit on a PDA or mobile phone.
As more of us start to read and write blogs on mobile devices - the approach to design best practise will have to adapt/change. For example - black text on grey background (sorry silver DG) whilst may be ideal for full screen viewing with sit-at-desk posture - might not be ideal for mobile screen viewing in sitting-on-the-bus posture.
And I must admit, being a very infrequent mobile phone internet user, that I hadn't considered my (presumably tiny) PDA/mobile audience before. Maybe these people should just buy a computer like the rest of us
The basic rules apply whether you are reading a book or a computer screen. Line length should be betweem 50 and 70 characters - not so long that it tires the eyes and not so short that the eyes must keep jumping back and forth. Obviously other factors such as the colour, background, type size and the leading (space between the lines) matter as well but line length is important.
That said we do read newspapers like the Guardian with narrow columns and justified text (with all the word splits) and still cope with it every day without complaining.
The vast majority of web pages aren't designed to be read on PDAs cos the vast majority of people don't have PDAs.
Pop artists point shows that we all get used to seeing certain things in certain ways and if the content is strong we will read it
TridentScan | Privacy Policy