I’ve been getting some traffic from A Newt One lately. My link is included in the 101rst Fighting Keyboardist blogroll somewhere on their sidebar.

Style:
The style of Newt One is based on white and colored text on a black background. This is harder to pull off than most people think. This is a much more unforgiving color scheme than its’ inverse . It’s difficult not to cross that subtle line where it becomes cluttered. I think that Newt One has gone over that line. What might be borderline cluttered on a dark on light color scheme might be cluttered on the light on dark version.

This site needs a much more unified color scheme. It currently visually breaks up into several blocks of content. This can cause it to be difficult to follow and difficult to navigate. This is exaggerated by the multiple fonts, font colors, font sizes, and varying background colors present. I think this is more because different authors post in slightly different styles than anything. Using a very tightly controlled color scheme, and a good CSS would remove the need for on the fly formatting, and would improve consistency. As I said above, the light on dark color scheme is much more unforgiving than the inverse color scheme. Variations in color and formatting are much more obvious here than they would be in another theme.

While there are a number of interesting graphical elements, they are almost entirely swallowed by other elements of this site. As an example, the 9/11 graphic on the top of the navigation bar is very interesting, but completely overpowered by other images. It is also placed incorrectly, and slides behind text when the page is scrolled.

Structure:
The site is built with a table layout, but incorporates some CSS as well. I don’t see that the table layout is helpful here. A strictly CSS layout would give much finer control over the overall style of the site.

Font tags are used extensively here, and this exaggerates the cluttered nature of the site. When each paragraph’s font styles are defined on an individual basis, differences, regardless of intent, occur. CSS controlled text styles, carefully designed and applied, would give this site a much more unified look, and significantly reduce the cluttered effect. This may seem insignificant, but this use of font tags also clutters up the RSS feeds for this site, making them difficult to read as well. Making your site cluttered is one thing, making your feed cluttered is something else entirely. An RSS feed is targeted at regular readers and people with visual impairment of some kind. These are two groups who are not going to appreciate this sort of treatment, and likely will unsubscribe.

Load time for this site is beyond unreasonable. Load time is 31.24* seconds for a T1 connection! How many of their viewers do you think have a T1 connection? I’d guess not many. DSL load time is 164.27* seconds, while dial-up is 494.24* seconds. Slow load time was caused by the 92 images and 15 scripts that were on the homepage when I tested it. This is completely unrealistic. They’re doing their traffic great harm by having load times like this. Whether they know it or not, they’re losing a lot of viewers who might have otherwise become regular visitors.

Content:
Content is a nice mix of current events and politics by conservative writers. Content has a lot of potential, and I think they are going to exceed even their wildest expectations with this website.

What would I change:
In short… everything, and nothing. This site needs to be taken carefully apart, and put back together. The general site layout is acceptable, as is the style, but it needs to be shifted to a CSS layout, with no tables or font tags. Then some simplification needs to happen.

• The number images needs to be brought under control
• Images that are used need to be optimized for faster load time
• The number of scripts needs to be lowered
• A unified posting format needs to be put together and strictly implemented
• The site navigation needs to be cleaned up
• Anything that interferes with the RSS feeds needs to cease

Summary:
This is a fine example of what not to do with a blog design. What did they do wrong? They did too much. Bigger and flashier isn’t always better. This site’s blog design is a hindrance to it’s performance, probably significantly so. Their traffic is being controlled and limited by their site design, rather than their content. I’d guess that within a short time after updating their style, their traffic will go up noticeably.

Contrary to what you might think from the previous paragraph, I think the design of this site has a lot of merit. I’m a big fan of the light text on dark background style, I used it myself for a while. Simplification and clarification are the key. This site needs to simplify it’s formatting and it’s use of images, and both clarify and simplify it’s color scheme. With those two things done, it will be able to live up to the potential of it’s content.

Update:
This post was originally posted in an incomplete manner. Due to technical problems on my end, the content section as well as several individual paragraphs were not posted. I write these posts in sections, then do an over-all revision. It appears that my last section, and the over-all revision were not initially posted. As I noted elsewhere, my apologies.

* Load times have been rechecked and revised. The resource I use to check load times may be malfunctioning, and these numbers are at best a guideline at this point. I did test this site on DSL and T1 connections, and my personal load time estimates were close to my automated test times.

Trackposted to Blog @ MoreWhat.com, Perri Nelson’s Website, Mark My Words, Faultline USA, basil’s blog, DragonLady’s World, Blue Star Chronicles, Pirate’s Cove, The Amboy Times, The Bullwinkle Blog, Dumb Ox Daily News, Conservative Cat, and Conservative Thoughts, thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe.