The Official Google Blog is of course a Blogger.com site. Google uses the site to announce new products, upgrades, and how-to information. According to their own statistics, they received: “More for the numerically inclined: 7.6 million unique visitors generated nearly 15 million pageviews this year.”

Style:
Google Blog, how I hate you… Let me count the ways:

1. Undefined link color
2. Poor layout
3. Poor ad placement (self promotion no less)
4. An overly small header which is overpowered by the sidebar
5. Poor use of color (none)
6. Did I mention poor layout?

I realize that they have a distinct style on their search engine pages, but this isn’t Google.com. This is a unique site which could have a distinct style of it’s own. It should have a distinct style of it’s own, but it doesn’t.

The only trace of color on the site is in the trademark Google logo, and the default blue links. They have carefully stripped away anything that might have given this site visual interest. Black text on a white background. (Yawn) Undefined link color. A simplistic header overpowered by a simple sidebar. Once again, someone has confused lack of style with design neutrality. This site should have been something fantastic, a credit to the forward looking company behind it. It isn’t.

A short list of the good web design aspects of the site:

1. It uses a fluid layout

Did I say it was a short list?

Structure:
The Google Blog is a Blogger based site with the simplest of templates. It doesn’t even have a valid HTML Doctype declaration.

According to HTML standards, each HTML document requires a document type declaration. The “DOCTYPE” begins the HTML document and tells a validator which version of HTML to use in checking the document’s syntax. – Web Design Group

While I normally cut sites a break when their advertiser’s code is poorly written, I won’t here. I won’t, because it’s Google’s own code that’s poorly written. Their own advertisements use invalid, and poorly written code. I’m sure that there’s some obscure coding reason that they do it, but it’s annoying. People try to put together good, well written sites, and they have to put up with the gibberish that Google puts in their ads. It could be done better.

Content:
The Google blog is used to announce new products, upgrades, and how-to information for Google.com, and it’s associated sites. More or less a the public face to a public company.

What I would change:
What a subject, what I would change… Simply? Everything! Dump the whole design and start over.

The header needs to be much stronger, the logo larger.

The sidebar needs to be pushed down in prominence.

For a company known for it’s colorful logo, let’s see some color in its’ blog. Add some color to the header, and the sidebar. Consider some simple graphical elements to differentiate posts. This should be able to be done with little or no decrease in load time.

Consider the priorities for the sidebar. The first three quarters of the sidebar is taken up with links promoting other Google sites, let’s give this site some space. Leave the search feature high up, but give the archives some space too. Bring the blogroll up too. Give one good ad priority up high, and push most of the other promotional links down the page.

Define the color scheme of the links. If you want the site to have blue links, define it as blue links. Give it a distinct and clearly defined color scheme. Currently link color is left to fall to individual user’s default settings, and that’s just silly. My default settings made visited links all but illegible, and I doubt I’m the only one.

Summary:
This is a poorly designed blog, not because of the way it was designed, but because for the way it wasn’t designed. There’s nothing wrong with minimalistic design, but it needs to be designed. This is a poor representative of what otherwise appears to be a very good company. No other aspect of the Google empire has been left undesigned and neglected like this site. It’s time that this was remedied. I won’t hold my breath.

Trackposted to Rightwing Guy, Wake Up America, The Random Yak, The HILL Chronicles, Dumb Ox News, Conservative Cat, and Right Voices, thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe.