Week 4: Pages from other books

I've been falling behind in my website reviews. I have a number of excuses for this. The readings are more immediately relevant to the course project than most of the websites are; the websites often have so much content that there's no way for me to review the site comprehensively; working on my website is much more interesting than reading Jesse James Garrett's self-marketing materials; I frequently have little to say about a website beyond "well, it's good that this exists." But these are just excuses. Let's get to work.

This week, I reacted the most strongly to Smashing Magazine's inventory of interesting blog designs. The author's commentary on what makes these designs unique, cool, and functional is making me wonder whether I've got the right idea about including a blog on the front page of my site. For one thing, all these blogs have at least two columns. They need the second column for navigational tools ranging from keyword search to a Blogger-like list of previous posts. A blog with no navigational tools is rather difficult to use for anyone interested in dated material. This should have been obvious, but it took fifty pictures of two-column blogs for me to figure this out with confidence. But to deal with it, I have to either adopt a two-column template, in which case I'm obliged to find stuff to put in the second column on the other pages of my site, or else (in the ideal case) figure out how to give only the blog two columns without breaking CSS. Since the blog is a very simple one, it's not inconceivable I could find a way to make a blog work in one column -- say, a contextual link to the archives at the top of the content -- but it could be tricky, and doesn't seem to be "best practices."

Interestingly, neither the Web Style Guide nor the Universal Usability site -- each the length of a textbook -- has much to say about designing blogs. The UU site is almost completely silent on the topic, and the Web Style Guide's advice is exceedingly general. I wonder how useful these sites are for people who aren't designing from scratch.