TechCrunch is like Marmite and blog design is impossible
The blog that launched a thousand startups has had a redesign today and readers are amazingly polarised in their opinions.
In general you either love it or you hate it.
We are about to re-launch Blogstorm but the design won’t change very much – the plan is to use excerpts on the homepage and a similar layout to the current one purely because that is what we believe most readers prefer.
Threaded comments will stay because they make it easier to add to the conversation, we will look to make them more user friendly because most people don’t tend to use them in the “correct” way.
Ideally blogs should let people choose how they want to read content but that’s what RSS feeds are for so is there a need to offer full posts rather than excerpts for the few people who want them?
Creating a new blog design and keeping everybody happy is impossible, the fact TechCrunch has upset a lot of people by adding whitespace is worrying because that’s a key principle of user friendly design.
I guess my question is, what do readers want from a blog design?
Patrick Altoft is Director of Search at Branded3, a Leeds SEO & Digital Agency specialising in SEO, Web Design, Development & Social Media.
Comments
Read the 14 comments below, or add your own!
I like the TC redesign, looks like an improvement to me.
The main thing for me is that the content is legible, keep distractions at a minimum and let me dig up old stuff in a simple manner.
I wanna ready articles, grab your RSS, leave a comment and bounce. Less is more.
Looks to me as if the redesign was simply for gaining some more premium advertising spots in the sidebar and header. Too bad you have to scroll down half-way just to see the content.
Thank goodness I just use the feed.
A lot of the time, people just don’t like change! I reckon if the old one was the new one and the new one was the old one a lot of the same people would still complain. “there’s not enough white space”, etc
if you make a redesign that don’t polarize people, then you screwed up.
there are always different user groups out there. one that appreciate change, others that are sceptical, and others (IE 6 users) who think change is shit.
don’t care about their opinions, just look at you (web analytics) date and see if you reach your goals better with the new design.
I like the new TC design. It’s much fresher, lots more whitespace makes it easy on the eye. It’s more 2008
I’m about to redesign my friend’s blog – which badly needs some whitespace:
http://www.videogamesblogger.com/
p.s. I really like the current design of BlogStorm because it uses the world’s most readable type – 13px Verdana.
If it’s good enough for the BBC, it’s good enough for me.
wikipedia is NO Follow so what you going to get from it? i didn’t get
Hi Patrick
Could you comment on your thinking behind putting excerpts on the home-page? I’m thinking of doing a re-organisation of my site, and putting excerpts of the latest blog posts on the homepage (rather than just a list of titles)
I’m thinking it will help with both SEO (more keywords on the homepage), and user-friendliness (more enticing info to lead people into reading the posts). Are there any potential downsides?
Cheers, Jon
For me it’s purely about making the site look like a newspaper site and making sure that the homepage has links to lots of articles.
Having to scroll way down a page is poor usability IMO.
I actually dislike excerpts on the home page, but it does solve another problem – duplicate content. You don’t have the post on the home page and on it’s own page too at the same time.
Here’s a new article from Smashing Magazine all about this subject:
Magazine Themes – Usage And Considerations
Thanks for the comment Patrick
It’s tricky to find the right balance when your site is trying to sell as well as inform. But I’m moving more towards the “content first, sales second” model – ie. building trust first with useful content
Cheers, Jon
>let me dig up old stuff in a simple manner.
I think this key – but dependent on your posting rate, article “disposability”, and audience profile.
My approach is to have an excerpts only front page on the mattwardman.com domain root, and a more tradition blog design on mattwardman.com/blog.
The tabbed approach on my front page means that people can quickly scan up to 100- 200 titles quickly, which helps justify – I try and segregate content into “quick turnover” (short/news) and “slow turnover” (analytical/comment) articles, and to keep the latter linked for at least a week.
I think the biggest problem with Techcrunch (and potentially Blogstorm) is the difficulty of finding previous content as a result of a high turnover rate – it looks as if the average article stays on the front page for about half a day.
@ Charles – thanks for the link to Smashing Mag, very useful article
@ Matt Wardman – re. “digging up old stuff”, I’m leaning towards a “Most Popular Posts” section on the front page, and a “Related Articles” list at the bottom of each post
Yoast.com has a nice idea – a “Featured Post” block that seems to randomly show older posts. He also has a good article on how he redesigned his site.
Thanks for the useful discussion!
Cheers, Jon