Experiment Design

Paul Scrivens / 04.28.08 / 2 responses / Design

If I asked you to describe a typical blog design you more than likely would tell me that it has 2-3 columns with the main content on the left and sidebar content on the right. A header with some navigation along with the logo and a footer. It makes sense.

Now if I asked you to describe a typical blog homepage design would you provide me with the same answer? Should you? Although it depends greatly on how the blog functions how often do we see the homepage look like any other page for the blog?

The Superficial

As you can see The Superficial uses the same layout for its homepage and entry pages and it makes sense because the articles are short and the site is updated frequently. When a user visits the site they want to see what’s new right away and probably read it at the same time. There might be some minor changes you could make to the homepage design, but you can’t fault the design for sticking to the norm because it works with the site’s purpose.

Veerle

Veerle gives her audience more of a snapshot on the homepage, but if you know about her site I would be more interested in all the great articles that she has written. Her entries are usually great resources so they aren’t date-dependent, but the best snapshot of that you get is in the “Previously…” section.

TechCrunch

ReadWriteWeb

TechCrunch and ReadWriteWeb are similar sites that have many of the same characteristics. However, their homepages differ so it is interesting to know which is the most effective. TechCrunch doesn’t vary their pages and you would think this causes readers to simply scroll through the homepage and click away when done. I know in my case I have no problem going there, reading the entries and moving on. If I want to go deeper then I go in deeper.

ReadWriteWeb does a decent job of providing a snapshot of what is current on the site, but because I am forced to clickthrough each article to read its entire contents I find myself rarely doing so. It is understandable why they take this approach because their entries many times are longer than those found on TC. To show even just two of them on the homepage would make for a very long site. This doesn’t mean though that the homepage design couldn’t change a bit and do a better job of giving me a snapshot of what is happening on the site.

Expert Idiot

Expert Idiot is a site that is updated usually once a day and in that case my thoughts would lean towards a design that shows the one entry for that day similar to 3by9. However, I went away from that only because I wanted to see how this layout would work. Something similar that might be more effective is a big listing like above, but in a sidebar with the most recent entry showing its full contents.

Most of the metadata on blogs is unnecessary in my opinion. Rarely do I care what category an entry is posted in and only care about the date when the subject matter is time-sensitive. Because of that both of those elements were hidden from view, but can be seen when hovering over a title.

Now this layout could totally bomb because it might not make sense and I might have went too far removing elements that would help enhance the understanding of what is going on. Time will tell.

Emersian

In the general sense I only refer to Emersian as a blog because I use blogging software and I allow comments. Beyond that it is more of a resource site to me and I wanted the homepage to reflect that. None of what I write here is time-sensitive. I’m trying to write articles that can be read years from now and although the examples may be out of date you can easily find when they were taken.

I also wanted my audience to go to the homepage and say “Wow, look at all the resources I have available to me right here” and I could only do that with the layout that I picked. The site is all about design so categories aren’t necessary with the titles and again, dates were removed because I don’t see them as being significant enough to warrant placement on the homepage.

Once you visit an entry page you will see a typical blog layout because that is what works for these pages.

9rules

No matter how many other editions of 9rules get put out this design has a good chance of always being my favorite. We tried to push the envelope and provide a general overview while giving a small insight into what the site contains. I do think maybe we would have been better served with a long listing of the recent content across all our mediums, but we took a chance and learned some things.

The content that was on 9rules (new version launches 4/30/08) is frequently updated, almost every minute. Our audience loves to digest this information and the homepage didn’t help them to do that. This was a tough design decision because we felt that we could easily overwhelm them with content and went the other direction by trying to guide them throughout the site.

One thing we could’ve done is placed a focus on one type of content (Member Entries, Notes or Clips) and pushed that onto the homepage and relegate the other two types to secondary status. This would allow our design to have some focus and hopefully give our audience a better understanding of what is going on.

Don’t be afraid to push the boundaries of the layouts you create. You don’t have to make an experimental design public, but don’t resign yourself to simply thinking you need a default two column design. Also don’t get crazy experimenting with layouts just to do so. Each decision should have a reason behind it based around the content of your site and how your audience uses the site.

2 Responses

Wednesday / 04.28.08

I’ve actually been thinking about this ever since I saw http://astheria.com/ and your site, both of which use a home page quite different from an article page.

(Wordpress/Movable Type/Blogger defaults, of course, but that’s the easy answer

Anyway, interesting article.

Paul Scrivens / 04.28.08

Interesting you bring up Astheria because I was going to use it as an example here, but figured I was making the article long enough. It’s definitely a beautiful site and in my gallery.