A Little Design
Back on Lab with Leo
I’ll be critiquing Web sites again on The Lab with Leo this month, so you have a chance to submit your Web site for a quick review on television. It’s a chance to get a little free advice from me, and to get your Web site seen by all the viewers of Leo’s show—nothing wrong with that!
This video tells you how to get in on the action!
Get Reviewed in the Web Workshop on Lab with Leo
I've appeared on the G4 Tech TV show The Lab with Leo several times this summer and fall, and now I'm a fairly regular guest in the Web Workshop segment. It has really been fun to do the show, it's such a different energy than Hop Studios and it's fun to go and get the makeup on and talk with all the great tech guests that come to the show. I've got one more appearance this year, and I thought I'd let you all know that you, too, could be the subject of a quick review of your Web site on the show. It's a chance to get a little free advice from me, and to get your Web site seen by all the viewers of Leo's show -- nothing wrong with that!
This video tells you how to get in on the action, but you have to hurry! We need site submissions by Dec. 9!
Mobile Edge Comes Through
I got an extra Christmas present in December from the makers of my laptop bag: Mobile Edge. Lewis Lustman, director of marketing for Mobile Edge, left a comment on an earlier post of mine and then followed up with an email to me.
I picked the Mobile Edge Chocolate Suede Tote because I wanted a laptop bag that looked like it belonged to a woman, and that didn’t involve black canvas or vinyl. It was a tough search, especially since my laptop—at 17”—was too large for many of the more fashionable bags. When I found a Mobile Edge bag at Fry’s, though, I discovered that I could fit my laptop into the bag, as long as I didn’t put it into the actual slot created for it. Since the bag was quite padded anyway, I’ve been merrily using it and putting file folders in the laptop slot since.
Recently, though, Lewis told me, Mobile Edge had started making an insert just for laptops like mine (huge) and he wanted to send me one. Naturally, I accepted.
Now, one of the things I really liked about the Mobile Edge tote I chose was that the interior piece that holds the laptop is just an insert; it can actually be removed completely from the bag (and get this, when you remove it, you don’t loose any interior pockets or features!). This means you could buy a couple of inserts and say, use the same bag for more than one laptop.
When my new insert arrived, I pulled out the old 15” insert, popped in the 17” and the laptop fits perfectly. I have had a chance to use the bag since putting in the new insert, and things do fit a bit better when you can put the laptop into the right place, so it actually feels like I have more space, not less.
I’m still a huge fan of this bag, which is well-made and durable, and I can now recommend it unreservedly for carriers of 17” laptops as well.
My one remaining complaint is that bag + laptop + peripherals + book + ... well, it’s all a little heavy. That’s more of a physics problem, though. I’ll let you know if Mobile Edge cracks the code on breaking that whole two bodies of mass attracting each other thing.
Thanks, Lewis!
Change Your Desktop Background, Change Your Energy
It’s Tuesday. The adrenaline rush that was Monday’s panicked sprint into the week is over, the first night of sleep deprivation is hitting hard, and I’m staring at the computer with the vain hope it will do my work for me. (No luck so far, and I spent how much on this thing?!)
I need a pick-me-up, something more than the several cups of caffeine I’ve already consumed. Something legal. Something fun. Something… it must be time to change my destop background image.
Happily for me, joey interactive has done the research for cool desktop backgrounds for me. This list of sites of “Desktop Backgrounds for Designers” will keep me visually appeased for some time to come.
Now, has anyone found that plugin or patch that makes my computer design Web sites while I knit?
I’m Too Sexy for My Blog
OK, I’m not really too sexy for my blog, but that was the name of the talk I gave at Northern Voice on February 11th. My talk was about blog design, with a bit of a focus on what you can do without being a professional web designer yourself. I promised to post my slides, so here they are!
And, here are the URLs of the blogs I shows as examples during the talk:
- Hot Sauce Blog
- Diva Marketing Blog
- Not Pretty
- Radiant Marketing Group
- Candy Blog
- Niall Kennedy’s Weblog
- Kottke.org
- Dan Gillmor’s eJournal
- DarrenBarefoot.com
And, finally, courtesty of Bruce Sharp, here’s a link to the audio (which is even edited!). Thanks, Bruce, and everyone at Northern Voice for the opportunity.
Photo taken by Kris Krug
UPDATE: Ha, ha, it helps if you actually put in the link to the slides when you say you’re going to!
Visuals Impact Web Site Visitors Instantaneously
There’s a fascinating article on Nature.com today about how quickly Web site visitors make a judgement about a Web site’s visual impact—they do it fast.
From the story, titled “Web users judge sites in the blink of an eye”:
Like the look of our website? Whatever the answer (and hopefully it was yes), the chances are you made your mind up within the first twentieth of a second. A study by researchers in Canada has shown that the snap decisions Internet users make about the quality of a web page have a lasting impact on their opinions.
The story goes on to imply that having a negative visual impact means visitors may leave before they even know what you’re offering, but I don’t know that that is necessarily true. Bad design can hurt a Web site, it’s true, but it isn’t the only factor in creating a usable Web site—just apparently the one that makes the first impression on your visitors.
Design Blogs Make the Washington Post
A Dec. 1 story in the Washington Post lauds the success of design blogs, their creators, and their readers. The story, titled “Blog Wild” has this to say about design blogs:
For people obsessed with design, the advent of design-focused Web journals, or blogs, has been a wonderful, terrible development.
Wonderful because these idiosyncratic Web sites, in which specific and frequently updated content is filtered through an individual blogger’s sensibility, give devotees an opportunity to indulge their obsession at the click of a computer mouse. Terrible because, as anyone who has ever discovered a favorite blog already knows, the impulse to hit the “refresh” button every five minutes to see what has been posted most recently can take over one’s life, putting things like social calendars and professional advancement in peril.
[Come on, journalists, can’t we have even one story that doesn’t find something snarky to say about blogs?]
Congratulations to Apartment Therapy, MoCo Loco, Design*Sponge and Funfurde, who were all featured.
Looking for a Blog Designer of Note
I’m looking for someone who has made a name for themselves doing blog design (a la Moxie) to participate on a blog design best practices panel at SXSW Interactive. Ideally this would be someone who is making at least part of their living doing blog design. I’m not looking for blog strategy consultants—I’m looking for folks who are messing about in the guts of code, CSS, and graphics. I’d love to get your nominations and suggestions (leave a comment, please). I can’t take everyone, so I’m looking for the best!
Step By Step, Blog Tools Explained
Susannah took the microphone and the keyboard today in order to demonstrate via a live Internet connection the details of various blogging tools.
She set up a demostration blog, using Typepad. Then she walked through, step-by-step, how to:
sign in
make a new post
edit an existing post
change the color of the post
formatting a post to add bold, italics, indents and lists
linking to other Web sites
These are very basic things to do, but they were a warm up for one of the most confusing things to do: the trackback. The demonstration was carefully planned, and went smoothly without error. I could see the signs of relief as understanding settled over the audience. (For those reading along, here’s a good primer.)
With trackbacks accounted for, Susannah undertook a review of blog site designs: what works, what doesn’t. Without the screenshots, it’s a little hard to recreate the discussion, but essentially… most blogs share many of the same design characteristics. A few blogs use radical designs, but in a quick survey of the room, it seems that if you want a blog to be immediately accepted, adopted and read, stick with a basic format. In fact, Paul Chaney added that perhaps one reason for blogs’ success is that there’s such uniformity of design—you don’t need to relearn an interface with each new blog.
Basic blog design similarities were covered yesterday. Today, discussion was more about color and font choice, alignment and other structural details, and then how to actually modify the design, yourself through one of the blogging interfaces, or by hiring a consultant.
Other blogging tools were demonstrated, too: Expression Engine, Wordpress and Blogger. All share the same basic tools, but in fact the interfaces do take a bit of getting used to, and each has its own quirks and additional features.
I should also add that the morning tea break had something you never see at North American conferences: instead of bagels and danishes, the food provided was deep fried chicken morsels with spicy red sauce, and “mee” noodles with bok choi and mushrooms. For someone who loves Asian food as much as I do, this was wonderful.
I’m cross-posting this on three sites: Buzz Marketing with Blogs, Radiant Marketing Group, and BlogAsia. If you’d like to comment, please come to BlogAsia to do so.
Blogher Panel: Blog Design
These are my notes from the morning session at Blogher:
Design isn’t just about looks – it’s about information presentation that makes sense. What’s interesting with blog design is that there is a different dynamic than from Web design, much less print design.
Lynda Keeler, creator of delight.com, spoke about creating several versions of the site, working her way through brand identity issues. She used Typepad because it is fast and easy, plus easy to post to. (She’s now migrating to Movable Type.) She set out to create a lot of images to break up the type and visually identify the blog. Her first attempt was very straightforward. As the blog became successful and got visitors, she redesigned to accommodate advertising. She went to about a thousand blogs and worked with a graphic designer to find the best layout for delight.com.
The next stage will be to recast delight.com as a way to share information not only from this blog, but from other blogs she has created. The plan is a site that gets information out there quickly, but gives prominent placement to advertising space.
She makes the point that blog design is about defining your own goals for your blog; each design solution needs to be unique. Plus, design revisions should shift as your goals and ideas for the blog change.
The important elements of design are:
- knowing your goals
- understanding your audience
Keep your topic in mind when thinking about your design. Don’t forget to plan for growth, and for a shift in direction, to the extent that’s possible.
Take a look at other blogs, especially those that have topics and audience in common with yours, for ideas and inspiration.
It’s key to remember that blogs are something that get visited daily, even hourly, and because of that usability and layout are critical. Create consistency so that your visitors know what’s new and hot; think about setting off that content with colored backgrounds, for instance.
Don’t forget that bandwidth is still an issue for a lot of people. Faster downloads mean happier visitors! Use text as a graphic element – colors, sizing, and style can make text pop in the way graphics do.
Lynda advises that dark backgrounds sometimes equal less legibility. The same is true for very small text, especially when you have an older audience.
Use pullquotes to set off a section of your text and give it emphasis, as in this section of this post.
Break your posts up into short paragraphs. This doesn’t mean you can’t write long posts, just that you should break them up.
Take a look at your site stats to get information about your visitors and what their technological setup is, especially screen resolution. Sitemeter and StatCounter are both free stat resources you can implement on your blog.
Gina Hughes blogs on Techie Diva’s Guide to Gadgets. To create the Web site she hired a designer to help design the brand.
While finding a designer, she looked for work that resembled her vision and ideas. The designer created an illustration that served as the only customization of the blog for three months. As she grew her audience, Gina reworked the design to reflect softness and femininity, with a welcoming feel for women and even for kids.
Recently she revised the design again to get a little edgier, adding more black and bright pink.
She advises you do your homework when you get started. Investing in design conveys that your site is credible, that it has potential, and will grow. Design can reflect your authority, personality, identity, and style.
I asked about how you rationalize spending money on design when many of your readers read your blog via RSS feeds and may not ever make it to your Web site. Gina said that design was important since many blog readers are a) unaware that they are even on a blog and b) not using RSS at all.
Lynda answered by saying that you should address this issue by writing compelling post titles that get people to click through to your blog – and then they’ll see your design.
A big topic of discussion was about whether there needed to be a differentiation between a Web site and a blog.
One suggestion from Heather Parish was for bloggers with smaller budgets and time is to do as much as you can with your blogging software’s built-in design customization (font colors, etc.) and to maybe just pay for (beg, barter, steal?) a custom banner to put on the top of the blog.
Gina Hughes followed up by saying that her design evolution followed the growth of the site; design spending scaled up as the site became more successful, though she also took full advantage of Typepad’s customization tools.
Mindy (The Mommy Blog) talked about the need to pay for design in order to build a brand so that she can be unique.
Staci Kramer of OJR asked about the key features of a blog that should be regarded as completely necessary: search, email this, and…? Becky Walters said that a print this feature is also key.
Techiegirl has links and resources if you want to learn more about blog design.
Incidentally, the wifi was down for all but the first few minutes of this presentation, so I’m not sure when I’ll be able to post this. Kudos to Lynda and Gina for adapting in the face of not being to access and show their blogs!
P.S. If you’re looking for blog design, I might be able to help you with that.
Tags: blogher, bloghercon
A Design is Worth a Thousand Words
Yesterday I found a post on the Work Boxers blog titled “The Prelaunch Success Plan” that had some interesting observations about the importance of designing an attractive blog:
...if you have a design blog and it is well-designed and looks “pretty” then this instantly builds credibility for yourself. On the other hand if you launch a design like my own with very little use of images and color then the initial impression of the first-time visitor is that my credibility isn’t as high as the next guy who has a better looking design. Notice how all of this occurs even before they read the content?
(There is a lot of good stuff in this post about preparing to launch a blog, so be sure to go read it.)
Bloggers talk a lot about words. How long should posts be? How frequently should you post? How do you write well for the Web? What posts get users to comment? Words are key, and of course they are mostly the point. (I’m not talking about photo, audio and video blogs, of course.) But given all that, an blog that is unreadable because it uses dark grey text on a black background is just as unreadable as one that uses poor grammar and spelling.
Design sends a message to your readers, literally unspoken, about your attitude, seriousness, reputation, and credibility. Design makes a statement you don’t have to spell out in words, and everything about the way the page looks influences how it is read.
I’ve been thinking a lot about blog design these days—not a big surprise given my job, of course—and looking at a lot of blogs. I’ll share some of that thinking with you in the near future.
Until then, think about the idea of design and how it applies to what you have to say:
- What is the tone of your Web site? What impression do you want to give your visitors?
- What kind of imagery is appropriate to your topic(s)?
- What are others doing on their blogs with design?
Amazing AmazType
Let me introduce you to AmazType, a cool little Flash application that turns search results from Amazon into a visual representation of your search term. If you visit the site and do your own search, you’ll find that each little book cover is clickable, giving you basic information about the book, with a link to the full Amazon page.
It’s cute, but is it useful? That’s for you to say. What I have to say is that I love seeing any Web site that turns out something more than list of text for search results. And I love cool little Flash files.
Source: Saw this on Sitepoint first.
Laptop Bag Search
So I bought a new Dell laptop recently—must blog while traveling—and now am searching for a suitable laptop bag. Imagine my happy surprise in finding that laptop bag manufacturers have picked up on the fact that women might like to carry something more attractive than the usual black vinyl velcro monsters. Side note: I don’t see why women are the only ones who might appreciate an attractive laptop bag. Surely there are men who’d like something besides black?
At any rate, there are now bags in all kinds of colors and shapes, some unbearably feminine and some unbearably expensive. My favorite is Mobile Edge’s Chocolate Suede Tote, pricy at $169, but oh so luscious.
Here are a few ladies’ bag manufacturers to check out:
- Talene Reilly
- Casauri
- Clark & Mayfield
- eBags
- Samsonite
- Sumdex
- More? Send me your links…
My big complaint, however, is that apparently we women are supposed to carry the itty-bitty laptops. Almost none of the bags I found will actually fit a 17” laptop. My feminist side wants to jump to the conclusion that the laptop bag manufacturers don’t think ladies do serious computing, but to be fair I suppose there are a fair number of standard laptop bags that also don’t fit 17” laptops. The search continues.
UPDATE: I found the Mobile Edge Chocolate Suede Tote at the Fry’s Electronics store in Burbank, and brought my laptop into the store to try it. They have several sizes, but the largest will actually hold my 17”, as long as I don’t try to put it into the pouch they put into the bag for holding laptops. The bag is quite padded, however, so I’ve been able to use it with no problem, and have actually removed the padded pouch completely. The bag looks terrific and gets lots of compliments, and best of all—looks nothing like a laptop bag. One warning: fully loaded, it’s darn heavy!
Don’t Make Me Think!
If you’re interested in Web design and usability, you can do no better than reading Steve Krug’s book “Don’t Make Me Think : A Common Sense Approach to the Web.” The second edition of his book will be out in July, but you can pre-order on Amazon now. This book is one that I go back to again and again to remind myself to keep design simple, functional and always, about the user. I recommend it for anyone trying to get a feel for the process of Web design, from programmers to managers.
In his recent newsletter, Steve says:
In the last update (back in August), I mentioned that I was writing a second book (the do-it-yourself user testing how-to book). Back then, my plan was to write that one first, and then do an updated edition of Don’t Make Me Think. But somewhere along the line my plan changed.
Instead, I’m writing the second edition of “Think” first. (It’s due out—at least according to my publisher—in July.) One of the main reasons for the change was the realization that by the time I finished writing the second book I might not have enough brain cells left to update “Think”.
Honestly, there’s not that much in the original “Think” that I’d change. But doing the update is giving me the opportunity to add a few “lost chapters” that I wanted to put in the first time around but had to abandon so I could finish the thing while the Web still existed. Also, the update gives me the chance to cover some interesting topics that people always ask about during my workshops.
July can’t come soon enough for me!
Six Apart Redesigns
Six Apart has launched a redesign of the Six Apart which does a lot of bring Movable Type, Typepad and LiveJournal identifiably under the Six Apart umbrella.
(I also note that movabletype.org redirects to http://www.sixapart.com/movabletype/.)
I confess that I don’t fully understand the goat on the LiveJournal page, but the overall look is friendly and professional. The prominent placement (upper right corner) of business, academic and ecommerce case studies is a particularly clever demonstration that MT can be used for more than blogs of the navel-gazing variety.
About
This blog is the companion Web site for "Buzz Marketing with Blogs for Dummies," a book for business professionals looking for advice and solutions for business blogging by Susannah Gardner. In stores now!
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