Nothing like starting from the top, so my first review is going to be Daily Kos. Daily Kos is the 600 pound gorilla of blogs, currently averaging 432,000 hits a day.

Style:
The overall design is simple, using a very clean orange on white color scheme. Simple isn’t a criticism, it’s just not a graphically complex site. Graphics can be a huge bandwidth drain if done wrong or excessively.

The layout is a little cluttered. Mostly by an entire row of advertising as well as the traditional row of links. It does have a style switcher which allows for a wider version of the site, but the width difference is minimal. The switcher is a nice idea, but the execution of it isn’t what it should be.

The Daily Kos logo isn’t really to my taste, but it’s well designed and executed. It works well with the site.

The CSS is well thought out and quite detailed. I particularly like how the smaller details were handled. The blockquotes are nice and clearly differentiated, and the section breaks are good as well. The difference between good CSS and great CSS is in the details, and this one is very good. Overall I give the CSS great marks, it’s a credit to whoever wrote it.

Structure:
This CSS designed site is powered by Scoop. It has a good structural framework. It should reliably work on any modern browser. Load time is a very reasonable 8.85 seconds on DSL or 27.08 seconds on 56K modem. This is almost twice as fast as my site’s current theme which has a 17 second load time on DSL. Quality servers would likely be a factor there, but Kos’ very streamlined design is a factor as well.

I’d give Daily Kos negative marks for it’s random sloppy coding, but that appears to be almost exclusively in the advertising and posting rather than the basic structure of the site. Mr. Moulitsas should slap the hands of a few of his authors and that would be cleaned up. I suspect that a few of the authors are writing their posts in Microsoft Word and pasting it into their posts. That tends to add some odd and sloppy coding. No really significant errors that I can see.

Content:
Mr. Moulitsas runs a tight ship. While I don’t care for the writing, the content is well presented.

The site organization is reasonably good. I would think that most traffic doesn’t pass far beyond the front page, but links elsewhere are clearly marked.

What would I change:
While I can see why Mr. Moulitsas dedicates so much space to his advertisers (this is his livelihood after all) I’d try to come up with another option. I would reevaluate the placement of ads with an eye towards increasing the footprint of content. Thigns I would consider would be:

• Alternating ads with links in a single row sidebar
• Small horizontal ads between posts
• Fewer ads – a poor choice, but increased demand could increase costs to compensate for the reduced number

Any of these options would allow me to dedicate more space to the content which is key to readership.

I would also consider making it a flexible width site so that readers with higher resolution monitors can benefit from it. Adding a minimum width to the CSS would keep the site from compressing too much in smaller windows. There are javascript options for min-width as well.

I would crack down on the poor coding of some of the authors. While I am not familiar with the a href=”http://scoop.kuro5hin.org/”>Scoop platform, any reliable platform should produce reasonably clean code. The sloppiness I’m seeing in the posting is likely coming from an outside source like MS Word. Either that or some of the authors are not as familiar with XHTML as they think they are. This is of course an extremely minor point, but these little coding errors add up, and can cause problems down the road. I’d be most concerned with the coding errors effects on the RSS feeds which are much less forgiving than the traditional site.

Any alterations I would make to correct these issues would be designed to add to the site’s current style rather than altering it. The site’s current style is fairly good, and very appropriate for a high traffic site. Clarifying the current style by subtly, or not so subtly, altering the site’s current layout. Sacrificing the content for advertising space isn’t where to go. Without content, you have no site. Let the style and the content take their place in the forefront where they belong.

This site’s style doesn’t need to be redesigned, but redefined. One of the side effects of a redefining the style would be to increase the prominence of the Daily Kos logo and signature style. This could have beneficial effects on logo recognition and overall branding efforts. While this wouldn’t guarantee increases in merchandise sales, it sure wouldn’t hurt them.

To summarize, it is a good overall design that is structurally well executed. Stylistically, the encroaching advertising has started to take over the layout. Clarifying the design would be a good idea.