I see many of my blogging chums have redesigned their sites, upping the clashing colours level, squeezing themeselves into a small middle strip of the screen and generally jazzing themselves up a bit. Way to go?
Tandleman's offering is starting to look a little old fashioned, but in my view it is at least readable in the strictest sense of the word, in that you don't have to wander all over the place looking for the content. You will sense that I feel some of the redesigns are, shall we say, more successful than others, though I may well be deluded about my own.
Should I tinker? I'm thinking of it. Do I want to be the the only lemming left at the top of the cliff?
Quite possibly!
17 comments:
If it aint broke, don't fix it?
Middle strip can look ok though, I think. I don't think mine looks too bad or makes the content difficult to find.
Chunk.
Yours is pretty clear actually, but there's a lot of blue space. That's the design though that's offered. I'd like to see a more "two thirds2 scheme available.
Well you shouldn’t think you have to change. Only change it if you feel it would be of some benefit. Otherwise, change, just for change’s sake, could lead to a ConDem situation; the worst of both worlds.
On the other hand: if you want to get down and funky with the kids, go for it.
Back when we started all the beer blogs were brown ale coloured or simply white.
We never quite got why that was the case (sepia coloured blogging is soooo 'Web 1.s0mething')
Do beer drinkers all like brown coloured things because that's the colour of ale?!
Perhaps ours is garish. The pink at least anyway... hopefully readable though. Else I may as well give up the day job!
I really appreciated all the input you gave me when I redid Fuggled!
The thing I've found with the snazzy new backgrounds of beer is that it slows my browser down and makes it a lot more difficult to read the blog entry. I like simple!
I redesigned mine, but only using another of the standard templates because I thought it was clearer. I find websites and blogs slightly irritating if they load up bit by bit because they have too many designs, animations, backgrounds, etc. Some may look good when loaded, but many are so fussy that you struggle to read the content. As designs, they don't work if they're not easy to use.
Design that isn't usable is bad design, well said RedNev.
Which reminds me I need to optimise all our photos for the web at some point...
ChrisM - can I ask what browser you are using? I find that Chrome is significantly quicker than almost every other browser out there, and gives you more screen space than IE, Firefox or Opera with all their toolbars and other crap.
Chrome can be significantly faster, although I think some web devs still forget to fully test in it...
We are considering redesigning "Piss It Up The Wall" with images of the Manneken Pis statue. We feel like a redesign of this nature would illustrate our lightheartedness, as it pertains to beer and the awful nature of beer blogging.
Mark,
the webdevco I work for have made it one of our standard browsers to test sites in, along with Firefox, Safari and some product from MS. From my Google Analytics on Fuggled, Chrome accounts for 23% of my visitors, just behind the 28% using Firefox.
8.6% Chrome here with Firefox at 40.6%
Mark RAR - there's nothing wrong with sepia blogs!
I'm still a Firefox user, Chrome is on my 'to do' list.
I notice your blog gets a mention in the latest issue of Beer that just arrived an hour or so ago.
Personally I'd change the colour from beige as it's the worst "colour" in the world.
But all these centre-strip ones just look crap - what a waste of space! Oh, wait, maybe that's why - they've not got enough content to fill a "proper" sized page? ;-)
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