Helping Blogs Be Blogs

Friday, December 31, 2010

As WordPress has evolved from a writing platform into a full-blown CMS, most themes have followed suit by providing big header images, multi-level navigation and dozens of widgets that make sites look bigger and more popular than they actually are. It’s unclear to me how any of these things provide added value to the reader. Do you click on tag clouds? Do you find embedded Twitter feeds useful? Do you browse old content by clicking on individual months listed under past years? For me, the answer to each of these questions is a resounding “no.” Blogs have become superfluously distracting.

Janet Aronica recently wrote about what I believe is a side effect of this:

A mistake I made in blogging is wasting a lot of time on the look/feel of my blogs and getting frustrated with coding stuff I didn’t understand. I wasted time I could’ve spent writing screwing around with HTML and whatchamacallit and getting no where with it. I’d get the content right before I worried about headers, colors, widgets etc.

This is a common problem, and while writers ultimately choose how to spend their time, it’s not entirely their fault. Blogging platforms have evolved toward media publishing platforms rather than toward their “web log” roots. Themes use crowded designs to make blogs look important and popular. They deceive us into believing that those traits will come from design rather than from content.

I’m guilty of this, too. My last theme had so much visual candy that the emphasis was no longer on my content. Like Janet I spent too much time finessing my “about me” blurb, or deciding how many tweets belong in my twitter feed, or tweaking my category names to make them fit properly in the dynamic navigation menu. I didn’t do this because it’s what I set out to do; I did it because that’s what I had to work with, and it didn’t immediately occur to me how unnecessary all of it was to begin with.

With the obviousness of hind sight, and a clean, simple, content-focused theme to get me started, I’ve resolved to spend my blogging time writing rather than designing.

Now you go:

4 comments:

  1. Friday, December 31, 2010Janet Aronica says:

    I couldn’t agree more! (And I love this design.) I think that a lot of times for people just started out with blogging, the themes are presented to them with all these archives, calendars, widgets etc. and they don’t know any better so they just assume that that is what their blog has to look like to fit in with other bloggers. No, that’s wrong. Just focus on great content, first, then add the extras to (a) sidebar later. But the extras should only enhance the content, I think. (Like providing a way for people to subscribe via RSS or something.)

    Thanks for the shoutout!

  2. Friday, December 31, 2010Dan Croak says:

    Agreed. Related, check out Ryan Tomayko’s “Administrative Debris” article:

    http://tomayko.com/writings/administrative-debris

    “The idea is that the content is the interface.”

  3. Friday, December 31, 2010Natasha Lloyd says:

    Well put. I’ve recently come to the same exact conclusion. I haven’t written anything in a while, but when I start up again I won’t let myself get lost in the details of the design. People read blogs for the content, not the eye candy.

  4. Tuesday, January 4, 2011Jamie says:

    A blog is indeed a media publishing platform. Some may choose to just write text, but for many a blog is also a visual attraction. Just as the cover of a book is important in getting buyers to notice it alongside thousands of other books on a shelf in the store, so is the design of a blog important with so many millions of blogs on the internet. If you want to be noticed, then certainly a good design is a helpful component of the blog. People are very visually-oriented. It’s human nature!