LeVar Burton is blogging. He’s only done two posts so far, but they were a surprise. He’s the first celebrity blogger I know of who actually seems to understand the concept of blogging. Nicely written in a very personal, yet not too personal way. He’s writing about what he knows, and interests him. He’s even taking the time to do audio versions of his posts. Nicely done Mr. Burton, keep up the good work, and good luck with stopping smoking.
Today is the beginning of a new era. A time of change. A glorious new beginning… Politics aside, we now have a President who understands the power of the internet. As of 12:01 p.m. EST, White House dot gov has a new look.
Powered by some form of ASP, it’s a valid XHTML site. Getting a Microsoft based site to validate is an impressive feat all by itself, but this one is done with style. As well as the usual stuff you’d expect on a government site, they’ve included a blog and photo galleries. Not only included the blog and galleries, but made them the face of the site. Rotating imagery, dynamic content, and enough RSS feeds to satisfy even… me.
I have to admit, I’m rather impressed. Who really knows how the Presidency will go, but I like the start. Neat, clean and very professional looking. You could almost say, Presidential.
My hat is tipped to the designer. Beautifully done.
One of my favorite sites, a photoblog called Cascade Exposures, just moved. Go check out Jan’s new home.
The results of a fascinating study of the design of the top 50 blogs is available at Smashing Magazine. Some interesting results, but I was most interested in the ratio of fluid to fixed width layouts. 92% used fixed width. That seemed a little high to me, but I have noticed a strong trend that way in design lately. I was even more surprised to note that the writer describes the other 8% as “uses fluid elements”, but none used “used an elastic layout”.
I’ve always thought that a fluid width layout was a better design solution for most websites. Defining a minimum width for a site isn’t a bad thing, but a full fixed width layout is just too rigid. It doesn’t take the viewer’s preferences into account. You’ll also note that 56% of blogs surveyed used a site width of 951-1000 pixels. I don’t know about you, but that means if I’m viewing the site with my feed reader open, then I have to scroll left and right. Annoying! I’m sure I’m not the only person who dedicates less than 1000 pixels of screen width to their main browser window.
My favorite statisctic though was about the percentage of the layout used for main content.
“on average, 58% of the overall site layout is used to display the main content.”
The most important part of thelayout only deserves 58%? That’s the best you could do? That’s just sad, it really is.
A Small Design Study Of Big Blogs | How-To | Smashing Magazine
It is truly remarkable that among 50 top blogs not a single one used an elastic layout (width of layout grows with the growing font size) and only a small fraction uses fluid elements (layout changes depending on the size of the browser window). Here are the exact findings:* 92% of top blogs used a fixed layout,
* 8% used a fluid layout or a hybrid layout with fluid layout elements
(Engadget, Smashing Magazine, Gigazine, Coorks and Liars).
Because… it’s all about me. OK, it’s not actually about me at all, but they do link to me. The First Rule of Blogging is the first of what appears to be a series about blogging advice.
I’ve always been fascinated by the contradictions in life. You must do this, you must not do this. For every rule there is someone who made it big by breaking that rule. It’s a good post, I look forward to reading the rest of the series.
Has blogrolling been slow lately? It sure seems to be slow loading here. I’m considering restructuring my site so it loads last. Currently it leaves my content off when it fails to load.
This is the Monday edition of Open House, and comments and trackbacks are now open. If your site doesn’t support trackbacks, use the Wizbang Standalone Trackback Pinger.
I’ve recently joined The Cowboy Code Marshals, a group of bloggers who follow the Cowboy Code.
Why is it that radio stations tend to have atrocious websites? While I understand that they’re not in a visual field, you’d think they’d know enough to delegate to someone appropriate. Though I love their radio station, I’ll mostly be handling the review of 94.9 FM Star Country’s website as a lesson in what not to do.
Style
The style of bright, bold, and animated. That’s not a compliment.
The color palette is mostly yellow and blue as you can see from the screen shot above. While I can see a lot of potential with this palette, this isn’t quite working. Too much going on with the color. This will be an ongoing theme in this review. A simplification of the color palette would go along way here. Simplification would help unify the content, making it one page, and one layout, rather than the current series of disjointed and unrelated boxes.
Using blue and red text on a yellow background, as is done below the fold, isn’t helping this overly colorful and overly cluttered layout. Using a little quieter color combination would significantly improve readability.
By animated I didn’t mean lively. I mean there are a lot of things moving on this page. Very annoying. That white box that seems to have the only bit of real content on the home page… that’s animated too. It switches ever 30 seconds or so between three different blocks of content. Limiting the animation used here would also be an improvement.
One of the animated elements used on most if not all of the pages on the site has aspects that I like. The blue banner-like element just below the header. While I don’t think it’s currently working well as one of several moving elements, I like it’s purpose. It lets a viewer know what’s currently playing on the air. It’s a nice touch. I’d either simplify it into a less dynamic, and more text-like element, or change the page layout so that this element works better.
The layout is the biggest problem for me. Essentially this home page is laid out as four column page with a fixed width above the fold. Below the fold it switches to two column. Fixed width might be appropriate here, that’s arguable, but I’ll let it slide. The four column however really isn’t working here. It’s limiting the content to about 320 x 360 pixels above the fold (that’s the animated white box I mentioned above). That’s a lot of wasted screen real estate. Unlike the home page, most of the pages appear to be in a slightly better three column layout. Definitely an improvement.
Structure
I’ll start the structure section by admitting that I am a bit of a snob when it comes to site construction. Let me count the ways.
Taking that into account, there are a number of things I don’t like about this site’s structure. Fortunately, table layout isn’t one of them. The all CSS layout might be overly complex for my taste, but there are no tables to be seen. The other five items listed above do come into play though.
There is what I consider a unacceptable level of invalid code. While most of it is minor, that doesn’t really let the site off the hook. Sure they’re minor errors, but they’d also be easy to fix. Why not do that?
Microsoft and ASP.net rear their ugly heads. This is likely the source of a lot of the invalid code. It’s quite possible that there are very nice sites put together by Microsoft products, but every one I know of is filled with excessive amounts of invalid and extraneous code. From the looks of it, some of this content was also cut and pasted in from MS Word, which doesn’t improve my opinion of the site. In my experience, Word creates it’s own little validation hell. Some versions seem to add more extraneous code than content when you paste directly into an HTML editor.
Font tags are interspersed throughout the site for no reason that I can see. A few simple lines of CSS would allow use of the class elements to do the same thing. Much less labor intensive to change.
There are a lot of instances of inline CSS that I don’t see the purpose of. Using one of the linked style sheets would have been a better choice in most instances. Much easier to maintain, and much easier to change in the future. Eliminating the use of inline CSS and font tags would significant factor in creating a unified appearance site wide. It would also make it significantly easier to update this unified appearance over time.
There are nine scripts running when I tested the page. This seems a bit excessive to me. While I think this is a mistake, they have somewhat improved my opinion of this by using scripts local to their site. Remote scripts are, in my experience, much more likely to cause site problems and loading issues.
Content
The content is what you’d expect from a radio station. Events, calendars, bios of the on-air personalities. A lot of potential for a community radio station. A community the size of Roanoke can really benefit from a resource like this. That being said, I don’t think the site is living up to its potential.
There is also a blog for one of the personalities, which came as a surprise to me when I heard about it. It’s actually a nice addition to the site, though from a structure point of view it needs some work.
Blogging
As you can tell from my site, I’m in favor of it as a rule. It does however, need to be done right. A business should blog in a professional manner, or not at all. Robynn’s Corner is one of those aspects of this site that I think has a lot of potential. The potential for interaction between radio personalities and their listeners.
I think the content of this section of the site is perfectly reasonable, though there should possible be more. The layout needs cleaning in line with the rest of the site, though the header is a little clearer here. Like the main site, advertisers and site navigation need to be separated for clarity purposes. Having advertisers interspersed within site navigation and content is confusing at best.
Here’s what I think would really get this blog going.
If they’re going to blog, they need to jump in completely. The current blog is more of an almost blog. No comments, not RSS feeds. Not much in the way of timely posting. They need to update the blogging platform with something like WordPress or Movable Type, or don’t blog at all. Bringing in a consultant to train the staff bloggers wouldn’t be a bad idea. A dedicated support person would be better if blogging was to be made a priority.
What I would change
It would be an interesting project. Unification would be my first big goal. One unified site structure, with clean lines and a simplified color palette.
I’d start this unification plan by making the whole site three column.The four column home page is too complex and confusing. I’d top the page with a clearly defined header, no ads. The current use of most of the header for ads space is confusing to the eye. I bump that advertising down to just below the header and above the primary content.
While I like the idea of the live update of what’s currently on-air, that needs to have a little less prominence, I’d suggest the top of the right sidebar. I’d also suggest making it a little less flashy and dynamic. It draws the eye too much currently.
I’d make the sidebars full length. Currently they end where their content ends. I personally find this distracting. Running them the full length of the content section would make for a much cleaner look for the site.
Pick one primary site color, personally I’d go with blue. Nothing wrong with the current yellow and blue, but one needs to take the lead, with one being the accent.
I like the idea of the white text section headers on the electric blue graphic element that is currently being used, but I’d change the execution of that idea. Rather than making the text part of the graphic element, I’d use CSS to make the electric blue element a background image behind white HTML text. Much more versatile to use, easier to maintain. Right the text, apply the style and you have your section marker. You don’t need an image editor to change the text.
I’d build on that blue on blue color scheme. Define the whole page with the navy blue currently being used n the site, and accent it with a combination of yellow and the brighter blue.
Make the primary paragraph text color black, on a white background. Define the headings in blue to coordinate with the basic site structure. Use of yellow wouldn’t be out of line, but not as text or behind text.
Clean the navigation. Currently the left nav bar is breaking in both IE and Firefox, though in different ways. That needs to be cleaned up, and standardized site wide. I’d put all of the site navigation and functionality, searching and so forth, on the left, while shifting all advertisers to the right. The viewer needs to know, intuitively, where to find things. By dividing between advertiser and site resources, we can clean up what is currently confusing.
remove all font tags, and most of the inline CSS. Maintaining a site like this is time consuming, and there’s not reason to shoot yourself in the foot by making it more difficult to maintain.
Summary
My first impression is that this site is cluttered, disorganized, and needs a lot of help. My second impression though, is that while it does miss the mark, maybe not by as much as it might first appear.
Overall the site has a lot of potential, especially in my opinion, the blog. it is not however, living up to that potential.
While the radio station is wonderful, and I’m a big fan, the site needs to be brought up to the standard that the station has set for its radio shows. If it is, it will become a big resource for the station, and in my opinion, for the community.
Trackposted to Perri Nelson’s Website, , third world county, A Blog For All, , Pirate’s Cove, Right Voices, and Gone Hollywood, thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe.
I’m changing my WordPress Plugins around. It sholdn’t affect site use, but you never know. I’ve dropped the Challenge plugin for instance. While it was working well, it was a little annoying. Spam Karma is more than capable of filtering out what comment spam I get. Essentially I was using the Challenge as a diagnostic tool to help identify a PHP time-out error. It ruled out the problem I suspected, but I found the problem anyway, so that’s taken care of.
I’m trying out StumbleUpon. It’s essentially a search engine with a randomness factor in it. You tell it general categories of things you like, and on demand it shows you interesting content in those areas. For any of you already using it, I’ve added a Stumble it! button for your use. Use it!
I’ve been slowly making changes to my blog theme, you may have noticed, but probably not. Pretty minor stuff for the most part. Trying various things to streamline the blog design and make it function smoother. It’s actually working very well, but there is always room for improvement.
What not to name your blog – Slate Magazine
Whether you plan to write about food, your miserable day job, or a viable exit strategy for Iraq, the answer is always a negation: It’s more a matter of what not to name your blog. When CNN calls to ask for your expert opinion on farm subsidies, do you really want to be known as the Intrepid Ploughman? What follows are a few mild observations and modest suggestions based on a frightening amount of Web trawling.
A nice piece by Michael Weiss. I see that he’s used several of my favorite bloggers like Captain Ed , Sister Toldjah, and Allahpundit (now at Hot Air) as examples. For the record, if CNN calls, I’d be perfectly happy being known as High Desert Wanderer. As long as they spell the URL right.
I’ve been reading Mark Jaquith’s blog Tempus Fugit for quite awhile. Apparently though, I wasn’t getting the whole story. He’s also posting at Mark on WordPress and has recently started Mark Jaquith on Tech. Go check them all out, he’s quite good.
According to his Thanks, everyone post, Protein Wisdom is taking a hiatus of sorts in order to further the legal battle against “a certain crazed, vodka-sodden pole dancer”.
Good luck Jeff, you were one of the first bloggers I regularly visited, and I’ve been a fan ever since. I hope this episode ends quickly and in your favor.
ProBlogger has a good article on Blog Hosting, Domains and Blogging Platforms – What We Wish We Knew
While there is some real wisdom in getting a taste for blogging using some of the free platforms my advice to anyone who suspects that they might end up blogging on a serious level it is worth securing a good domain name and getting set up on a platform that you think you’ll stick with for the long term.
Blogging Tips: First Impressions Count
There are several “first impressions” your blog makes as it struggles to attract and hold on to readers. Few of those first impressions come directly from your blog’s design and layout. – (a guest post by Lorelle VanFossen of Lorelle on WordPress and an excerpt from her popular book, Blogging Tips, Tips Bloggers Won’t Tell You About Blogging.)
Mitt Romney’s campaign web site is up and running. It probably has been for a while, but I only recently noticed it. Here’s a few of my thoughts on the site.
Before I start with my usual review, I thought I’d mention the Five Brothers Blog. Mr. Romney has his sons blogging for him on a subdomain of his political site. A nice touch I thought. It’s dynamic nature should help drive traffic. Five people writing about Mitt Romney should definitely get good placement in the search engines. It seems to be well written too. They’re all following the campaign’s direction I suppose, but they all sound sincere. I think this aspect of the site will turn out to be big benefit as the campaign goes on.
Style
A fairly simple color palette, red, white, blue with a couple grays. Simple, but well done. The palette gives it a very clean and neat look, and the layout takes advantage of that.
The home page plays a sequence of campaign photos with links to press releases. They had the decency to run the photos fairly slowly, which is nice. A lot of sites seem to try to rush images by you at a rapid rate, but this isn’t unpleasant. It’s also, with one exception, the only moving part of the site, which is nice too. Too many sites find a technology like this scrolling images, and use it repeatedly. One moving image is interesting, two is annoying, and three will get you convicted of cruel and unusual punishment by any jury. The one exception I mentioned is a flash piece the plays when you hit the site for the first time. It’s a clever little bit of flash that shows Mr. Romney appear to walk out into your browser and welcome you to the site. My screen capture above shows him in the lower right corner. While it is clever, and is well done, I’m still undecided on whether it’s a benefit to the site or not. I’d think it would be found annoying by most people, but I could be wrong. It didn’t annoy me, but I’m a geek, and I’m fascinated by this sort of technological geekery.
The layout is mostly a three column affair. Nice and neat, everything in it’s place. They’ve so far stayed away from the clutter that can infest this sort of site. Hopefully they’ll continue that trend.
White space is used well. A fairly tight layout, but not too much so. Everything flows nicely, with no crowding.
It’s a fixed width page, which is a negative for me. I almost always think a fluid layout would be better. That said, this layout does work well. I wouldn’t hold it against the designer too much that this is fixed width. It probably wasn’t their choice anyway.
Structure
The site structure is decent. Almost entirely CSS with a table thrown in a couple of times. All tables appear to be used appropriately for tabular data of one kind or another.
While the site does view well in a variety of browsers, it could use some help. It has an unusually high number of validation errors and warnings. They appear to be mostly from the use of outdated or inappropriate coding. No individual problem is severe, but I’d be concerned that out of date browsers might have problems here. More than anything it looks like the Doctype doesn’t match the coding. Someone has upgraded the Doctype to something newer than the code can support. Again, not a big thing, but it should be fixed.
There are also some accessibility issues. A lot of images don’t have alt coding for instance. While this might be insignificant on a blog like mine, a campaign site needs to be really active on this. If you don’t give your viewers the information they came for, they’ll get it at another candidate’s site.
Content
The kind of political jabbering you’d expect from a campaign site. Nothing you wouldn’t expect with the possible exception of what could turn into a decent blog.
What would I change
I’d really only change the structure. Get the Doctype matching the code, and clean up the accessibility issues. Leave the style alone, and execute the style a little better with some cleaner code.
Summary
I’m a little surprised actually. It’s better than I thought it would be. Candidates seem to be taking the web much more seriously this campaign cycle, which is a good thing. A lot of people are using the web to do political research, and not taking it seriously can really hamstring a campaign. I think Mr. Romney will be well served by this site if it’s maintained properly.
Trackposted to Perri Nelson’s Website, Right Celebrity, DeMediacratic Nation, The World According to Carl, Blue Star Chronicles, The Amboy Times, Leaning Straight Up, Conservative Cat, Right Voices, and The Yankee Sailor, thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe.
I saw a political website that I liked for Fred Thompson. I even like the URL, I’m With Fred dot com. Most politicians take themselves way too seriously, and I thought this was a nice change. This will be a simple review, I just had a few comment I’d like to make.
The key to this design in my view is the simplicity.
I was shocked. A nice clean layout without all of that @#$% that this sort of site usually has. Political sites are usually design by committee nightmares at best. Maybe this will turn into one of those, but the initial site is refreshing.
A blog with open comments was another nice touch. I was particularly impressed by the fact that Mr. Thompson actually appeared to be doing some of the blogging. We’ll see how that turns out. I’ve been less than impressed with celebrity blogging as a whole, but his first few posts were not bad. No long diatribes. Just short notes about current events for the most part.
I’m not sure what I think of this campaign politically, but I’m impressed with the way they’ve put together this site and using it to their advantage. It appears to be well thought out, and well executed. While this alone won’t get my vote, it will keep me watching to see what he has to say. When it comes down to it, keeping people watching what Fred Thompson has to say should be the primary purpose behind this site, and in my opinion, it’s fulfilling this duty well.
Trackposted to Perri Nelson’s Website, Blue Collar Muse, Committees of Correspondence, third world county, Right Truth, The World According to Carl, The Amboy Times, Right Voices, and The Yankee Sailor, thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe.
Perri Nelson has very kindly given me the Thinking Blogger Award. This is a meme award. Each person given the award in turn tags five bloggers that make them think.
I easily came up with four, and I couldn’t decide on a fifth. There are a number of good competitors for the spot, but I couldn’t make up my mind, so after a lot of thought, here are four bloggers that I think deserve the Thinking Blogger Award.
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.
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.
Why do people unsubscribe from your feed? Darren Rowse took a poll at ProBlogger, and here are some results.
34 Reasons Why Readers Unsubscribe from Your Blog
Some of these I don’t need to worry about, like “Partial Excerpts Feeds”. Very annoying, I’ve unsubscribed because of those myself. I don’t think I need to worry about “Lack of Confidence or Opinion” either. To paraphrase Andrew Greeley, “I’m rarely wrong, but never in doubt.” Father Greeley would likely be appalled at me comparing myself to his Father Blackie Ryan character, but I’ll do it anyway.
Several others are things I should work on. I know I’m a little random on content for instance. “Lack of a sense of who the blogger is” could be a problem too. That would be ironic for an anonymous blogger. It’s a good list, go read the rest.
Trackposted to Perri Nelson’s Website, stikNstein… has no mercy, basil’s blog, Blue Star Chronicles, The Pink Flamingo, The Amboy Times, The Bullwinkle Blog, Right Voices, Pursuing Holiness, and Conservative Thoughts, thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe.
Since I don’t have any inspiration of my own today, I’ll steal someone else’s:
10 (+5) Requisites for Professional Bloggers
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