Clutter
Friday
Apr 14, 2006
Blogs are so cluttered! This is one realization you’ll end up with when you’re in the business of reading (and writing) blogs. Most blogs around are simply too cluttered to be any useful. Many bloggers, quite unfortunately, fall under the mistaken assumption that more information is better. Well, in most cases, it is my opinion that less is more.
Fact is, most users won’t give a damn about most stuff on your blog, anyway. What matters is that you lead them to where they would most likely find the information they might want.
Most of my blog traffic (the old J Spot and the J Spotter) comes from the search engines. And people who come from the search engines are not necessarily bloggers themselves. Most are casual browsers, searching for relevant information, which for some reason I have written about in my blog. What these people need are navigable pages and websites, and not sites full of gibberish and junk.
One of my ideal blogs is Joel Spolsky’s Joel on Software. On your first visit, you’ll know what the blog is all about. There are helpful texts and outlines that will indicate what exactly he does, and what exactly the site is for. I think it’s the ultimate in user-friendliness and usability. I tried to pattern the J Spotter after Joel’s blog, in terms of the availability of help texts and outlines.
The Minimalist
I think most blogs start out this way–minimalistic. Most designs are simple, and most work. Not all designs, though, have helpful links and navigation features. But still, they’re all right. Things go bad when a blogger tries to add too much information on the sidebars, headers, footers, and on the blog content area itself.
Again, less is best. I don’t mean that you should take out all information on your site. It’s best to strike a good balance in designing and conceptualizing your blog.
The List
Here are a few suggestions on how to set up a good blog design-wise:
# Contrast. Make sure your blog is readable by ensuring an adequate contrast level.
# Copy Size. Text that’s too big or too small is simply annoying.
# Speed. Optimize for speed. Not everyone’s on broadband, you know.
# Harmony. Out-of-this-world colors? Pictures running off the borders? Ugly blogs suck. Period.
# Helpful text. Readers would appreciate text that tells them who you are and what exactly your blog is all about.
# Navigation. Provide prominent links to relevant areas of your site. At the very least, make your blog and post titles clickable (leading to the homepage or static pages, respectively).
Comments
Escadscer
November 16th, 2007 at 6:29 pm
Two new studies show why some people are more attractive for members of the opposite sex than others.
The University of Florida, Florida State University found that physically attractive people almost instantly attract the attention of the interlocutor, sobesednitsy with them, literally, it is difficult to make eye. This conclusion was reached by a series of psychological experiments, which were determined by the people who believe in sending the first seconds after the acquaintance. Here, a curious feature: single, unmarried experimental preferred to look at the guys, beauty opposite sex, and family, people most often by representatives of their sex.
The authors believe that this feature developed a behavior as a result of the evolution: a man trying to find a decent pair to acquire offspring. If this is resolved, he wondered potential rivals. Detailed information about this magazine will be published Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
In turn, a joint study of the Rockefeller University, Rockefeller University and Duke University, Duke University in North Carolina revealed that women are perceived differently by men smell. During experiments studied the perception of women one of the ingredients of male pheromone-androstenona smell, which is contained in urine or sweat.
The results were startling: women are part of this repugnant odor, and the other part is very attractive, resembling the smell of vanilla, and the third group have not felt any smell. The authors argue that the reason is that the differences in the receptor responsible for the olfactory system, from different people are different.
It has long been proven that mammals (including human) odor is one way of attracting the attention of representatives of the opposite sex. A detailed article about the journal Nature will publish.