Smashing Magazine Blog Design Study
Smashing Magazine is currently taking a closer look at blog designs, then finding out what works and what doesn’t across fifty of the most popular blogs according to Technorati.
The Smashing team will likely use the results from thirty design problems that are encountered in every day design, and wants to pose solutions to them. Today, the first article of possibly many in the series on blog design was published, with the following results found on those blogs.
It is noted that the results should not be used to design your blog, but simply represents the number of blogs that are using those examples in their design.
Some of the findings are listed below.
- large blogs require a multi-column layout solution (usually 3 columns suffice) (58%);
- layouts are usually centered (94%),
- layouts usually have a fixed weight (px-based) (92%),
- the width of the fixed layout varies between 951 and 1000px (56%),
- 58% of the overall site layout is used to display the main content,
- CSS-layouts are used (90%),
I am looking forward to the additional posts, which will be published next week, on additional findings and the best ways to captivate one’s audience through the use of design.
Smashing Magz now the center of blog designing and many will follow what they said? I don’t think so, the layout design is should see the requirements, nothing is fixed/absolute in design, trends maybe.
Your blog doesn’t have to be three columns just because large blogs have three columns. They may need to make the layout in three columns because their contents are heavy, so if your blog is don’t have much content, why make it three columns?
@shearyadi – First of all, thank you for your comment.
As I and Smashing Magazine noted, the findings are not to be solely used in blog design, but rather serves as a study of what the big blogs are using for their layouts.
In a sense, you can use these findings to experiment with your design, including font use, layouts, etc. It appears that they will be using the findings and writing posts on effective design in the future.
For example, with my fairly minimalist layout, I could easily use a two column layout, but chose to stick with a three column look, simply because I needed flexibility if I wanted to add more content to the sidebars down the road.