Staying with the “starting from the top” theme, my second design review subject is Michelle Malkin’s Internet broadcast site, Hot Air. A powerhouse conservative blog which is currently averaging 67,917 hits per day.

Style:
The content packed layout was designed by The Blog Studio with a minimalist color scheme. It is a clean black and white design, with a moderate use of gray and some red highlights. Prominent advertising does not compete with content.

The overall style of the blog really quite good. The whimsical use of graphics and the Cox & Forkum logo in particular are well suited to the writing style of the blog.

The details of the site were not overlooked. The typography is well done, and a careful use of negative space makes the text flow nicely.

On a negative note, the blockquotes crowd their contained text on the top and bottom of each quote in the blog posts which I find a little annoying. They also crowd the left edge of the quotes in the comments, which I find more annoying. Both of those aspects are more a matter of personal taste than anything though. The CSS in general is actually fairly elegant.

Structure:
This WordPress powered site is a completely CSS layout as you’d expect. The structural framework appears very solid, and any modern browser would reliably represent it. Load time is high with 39.86 seconds on DSL or 127.88 seconds on 56K modem.This is a little more than twice as long as my site’s current theme which has a 17 second load time on DSL. This bandwidth drain is mostly caused by the high level of graphics. When I tested the load time, HotAir’s home page contained 66 images.

There is a little sloppy coding to clean up, but it seems to be almost exclusively related to advertising. This is an extremely minor point that would be very unlikely to affect anything. The blog posting code is very clean as are the resulting RSS feeds.

Content:
Content is a Conservative mix of politics and humor. It is graphically rich and updated frequently. In addition to the writing, three or four episodes of Vent, a Michelle Malkin vlog, are posted weekly.

Content is well presented in a clear and uncrowded layout. Very nice use of negative space with the blog posts.

What would I change:
The first thing I would try to change would be the load time. A difficult task that I’m not sure I would have much success with. This site is built around it’s use of graphics and the resulting load time would be difficult to improve upon. The load time definitely does not warrant changing the site style.

I’d make an attempt to clean up the advertisers code too, but this also could be futile. Small corrections are likely possible, but not all will be correctable. This is more annoying than anything. As a perfectionist at heart, I’d like things like this to be perfect, but it isn’t likely to happen any time soon.

Final summary:
This is a clever design, beautifully executed. It’s one of the best blog designs I’ve seen in terms of crafting the design to suit both the purpose and the authors. Well built, well organized, and just a touch of whimsy.