How coincidental, IMD345ers - read this article from SmashingMagazine…

Blog Design Survey

We have identified 30 design problems and considered solutions for each of the problems separately. We have posed 30 questions which we would like to answer with our blog survey. Below we present findings of our survey of popular blog designs — the results of an analysis of 50 popular blogs according to Technorati’s Top 100.

Considering Technorati’s top 50, we have filtered out social networks and blogs which have artificially become popular — e.g. via backlinks in released Wordpress themes. The prize for the most cluttered CSS-code goes to Smashing Magazine — however, we are going to do something about it over the next weeks.

Please notice: the results presented below should not be considered as guidelines for an effective blog design. They are supposed to give you the intuition of which solution may be better than the other one. However, you need to consider the context you are working within as well — following our findings blindly won’t necessarily improve your design. Still it is useful to know what big players do and, more importantly, what they don’t do.

1. Layout

Let us start with the analysis of the layouts used on the most popular blogs in the blogosphere. Are there more 2-column-layouts than 3-column-layouts? Are layouts centered? Are they fixed, fluid or elastic? Are tables still used? In this section we are going to answer all these questions.

1.1. How many columns?

The question whether one should use 2 columns or 3 columns in a design layout is almost philosophical. Unfortunately, we weren’t able to find any results from usability studies which would prefer one solution over the other one. As usual, it depends on the context and on the target group you are dealing with. In some cases it is just impossible to find a proper balance between primary and secondary content with 2 columns. In these situations you may need to divide the second column (sidebar) into two parts — in fact this solutions is used quite often.

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