Pro Blog Design

This blog is roughly 5 months old now, meaning that 2007 was both its best year ever, and its worst year ever. All in all though, I enjoyed it.

As a last tribute to the year, I’d like to share with you some stats from the blog, highlight the best posts incase you missed them, and then make a few resolutions for the next year.

In 5 months I’ve written 83 posts, which have gotten a grand total of 1877 comments. That rounds off to 23 comments per post; a fact that I’m immensely thankful to you all for!

What’s more is that if I included all of the nice comments left by those chatty wee spambots, it would be 83 comments per post. Wow. Thanks spammers Akismet!

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Photo by Tonyelieh Today is Monday 15th October 2007, Blog Action Day. If you don’t know what that means right now, you will by the end of the day. Blog Action Day is one day a year when bloggers around the globe unite for a common goal.

This year, bloggers are dedicated to helping the environment. I’m not going to make a speech about our planet, what our shortcomings are doing to us, or what they will do to us. There are better, wiser bloggers who will do that much better than I.

I’m going to ask a single question; when it comes to our planet, have you done more harm than good, or more good than harm?

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Minimalist blog design is all the rage these days. In the pursuit of usability and a better user experience, designers everywhere are stripping out the needless elements of their sites. The result? Clean, fast loading sites that a user can actually use.

As with any design trend, there are two questions you should ask yourself.

1. Why should I adopt a minimalist design?
2. How can I adopt a minimalist design?

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Pro Blog Design had its one month anniversary this week, and so instead of the usual weekly wrap-up post, I’m going to do something selfish. I’m going to write about Pro Blog Design’s first month. And what a month it has been!

The Milestones

I have a document on my computer, where I save a list of all the milestones Pro Blog Design has passed. I wish I could list them all, but there have been so many!

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Typography is the practice of arranging letters and words to make them more readable, or more visually interesting. On the web, typography has long been hindered by the technology. However, times are changing and the future is looking bright for the art of typography.

The major hindrance of web typography is the very limited font set that is available to all users. When settings font in a CSS file, you can set one font which the site looks best in, but if users don’t have it, you need to fall back to one of the usual suspects. Stuart Brown has a rundown of 5 of the most-common web fonts, letting you know which to use, and which to stay well away from.

With CSS, we do have some level of control over the appearance of our fonts. It isn’t the equivalent of the pixel-perfection in print design, but it is still something, and to this end, Clagnut has 10 helpful guidelines. One of the most basic, but most important choices in web typography is text alignment, which Kyle Meyer has explained extensively.

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Image by Ctd 2005 It began with ProBlogger. It became “newsworthy” with John Chow. It has been peppered with countless other blogs along the way. Redesigning seems to be all the rage this Summmer, but why redesign your blog?

The obvious reason is of course to simply make your blog better. When you first create a design it seems great, but over time you notice the cracks in the wall. Eventually the number of cracks builds up to a point where a redesign seems the logical choice. This certainly seems to have been the case with the fantastic ProBlogger redesign, and to this end, Simple Thoughts have put together a good list of 9 Redesign Ideas.

However, this isn’t the only reason. Among Ben Cook’s 5 Reasons For A Blog Redesign he has hit the nail on the head in one respect. Ben lists “Buzz” and “Linkbait” as his first two reasons for a redesign, and this is undoubtedly true in the case of John Chow.

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Clutter by di_ana Every Sunday, from now onwards, I intend on writing a Weekly Wrap-up post. The post will first of all present a set of links on a certain topic, related to blog design of course. After the links, I’ll write a little summary of anything special that happened on Pro Blog Design that week, and any comments that really stood out to me.

So without further ado, the first wrap-up is on de-cluttering your blog.

About a week ago, Darren Rowse set his readers the task of de-cluttering their sidebars, as part of his 31 Day Project. Of course, Darren’s blog has around 30,000 readers, so when he says to do something, mere mortals must do. The object of de-cluttering is to remove all of the “cool” widgets and such that have built up over time, but aren’t benefitting your readers. In response to this task, Mihai wrote up a list of everything in his sidebar, and assessed individually whether or not he should keep each one.

This is a great way of removing clutter from the sidebar, but what about the rest of the blog? Cue Skellie. Skellie has written up the most fantastic list of 50 Ways to De-Clutter Your Blog. Whilst I may not agree with them all, I can guarantee that you will find at least a few points which apply to your own blog, leaving you with some decisions to make.

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