First Web Log Review For Appearance

I visit a lot of other blogs and sometimes get annoyed by problems with their readability and general useability. With that in mind, and with the hope that the publishers of the reviewed blogs will change their layouts in response to my review, I present some views about good blog layout followed by comments about several blogs.

Here are some of my personal preferences on blog layout:

• The text should be easy to read. The foreground colour should not be just a slightly different shade of the background colour. The font shouldn't be extremely small. If you have a basically black font then make it black. The faded grey that MovableType and other templates use as default just makes it harder to read. Maximize contrast.
• Link list on right side. Links to other blogs and news sources should go on the right side, not the left side. That way if one has no intention of clicking thru to the one can narrow the page by dragging to make the links not visible. This frees up desktop space for other windows. Note that this is an advantage only if column widths are fixed (and, no, I don't use fixed column widths myself).
• Archive pages should have a link back to main blog page. Suppose you reach a blog by a link from another blog to a particular post. Typically that is going to take you to an archive page. Once you've read the post that brought you to the site the natural thing to do is to want to click to the main blog page. Too many blogs have no link on their archive pages for doing that. You end up having to use the mouse and delete key to cut the URL down to the core blog URL. Worse, a few blogs have main pages that are not just a cut down or an archive page URL. So finding the main blog page is a nontrivial exercise.
• Don't use alot of white space and border shapes. Some sites have so much margin and fancy drawn shapes that there is little room left over for blog messages. You can read one post or a post and a half at a time. Makes it necessary to page up and down too often and makes it harder to go back to some post you want to read again. Artistic layou can look nice on first appearance. But is it convenient for your visitors?
• Sort your blog links into categories and/or rate by quality. A site that has 50 or 100 links to other blogs is saying what exactly? That all the blogs are equally worth visiting? That the site author doesn't want to seem too unegalitarian by actually rating other sites? Most of us have too few hours in the day. Some guidance as to the types of blogs you are recommending would be helpful. Also, ranking them may seen unegalitarian but its helpful. Its why we visit our favorite blogs in the first place: we've decided particular blog writers are good at finding and choosing articles and information sources that we find worth reading.
• Comment dialog boxes should be resizeable. When you pop open a comment list and there are 50 comments it is extremely annoying to have to scroll the thing after every 10 lines and 40 columns to try to read all the comments that have been made so far. Just because MovableType and other blogging software come with a default unresizeable pop-up doesn't mean that bloggers should stick with this default choice.
• The control where visitors write comments should resize along with the entire dialog box. Hey, I know I haven't fixed this on my own blogs. Sorry about that. Eventually I'm write a scathing critique of my own blogs and point out all the other things I don't like about them.
• Serious successful bloggers should move off of blogspot. Visitors want to click on your URL and actually see the site load. Plus, there is that small matter of reliable archive links. Its only $11 per month to host on Hosting Matters. I chose that hosting service based on Bill Quick's recommendation and so far I'm quite satisfied with the service. Glenn Reynolds uses them too.

With this in mind here's a review of some blog sites that I frequent (or in some cases might frequent if they weren't so hard to read):

PejmanPundit's yellow text on dark grey background is hard to read. Am I the only one who has that reaction?

Also, I do not like the blackspace on either side. The browser window's own borders provide plenty of delimiting signal to my eye. Generally speaking, I find I do not like lots of white space or black space filler on sites. I do not want a browser window to be any wider than necessary. I may have other windows open on the desktop that I want visible at the same time. I don't want to waste space.

Also, for links on the right the light blue text on a gray-green background doesn't provide sufficient contrast. Make the blue darker and the background lighter. Or do the opposite. Just up the contrast.

Update: A friend who looks at this site using IE 6.0 sees the text as white, not yellow. But using IE 5.5 and Mozilla 1.2b I see yellow and the style sheet confirms that its not white since the post text color is specified as FFFFCC.

Samizdata.net is easier to read than PejmanPundit. This is partly due to the white text on a blue background. But the font looks better as well. Samizdata also wastes less in margin space. One can narrow the browser window to get rid of most vertical unused blank space that is outside the blog column. I'd still like to see them cut back on the margins on the left and right of each post inside the blog column.

The top and bottom margins between posts are excessive. There is the blue box with yellow outline as a boundary. So why use so much empty space as well? On this site one rarely can see more than one whole post at a time even when the posts are short.

The link list over on the left side is light blue text on a darker blue with a small font. They need to either increase the contrast or increase the font size.

This site demonstrates a problem I see on a number of sites: The Date is displayed on the most recent post of all the posts for that day. Well, its hard to spot that date. It doesn't get its own boundary shape. The boundary box between posts is quite large. There ought to be smaller boundary between posts (since they are already easy to distinguish for other visual reasons) and the box should just be put out before each date.

Also, this site does not show a Date/Time stamp on each post. I understand that the posters are spread out across many time zones. But it helps if one is coming back to the site to be able to guess where one left off if there is a time on the posts. Maybe GMT would be an acceptable time to use.

He is really Steve Bail but named his blog after the RAF captain which Peter Sellers played in Dr. Strangelove. You will recall that is the fellow stuck on the base with the USAF general who goes mad and rants about flouride and pure bodily fluids.

Well, a few complaints about Steve's site:

• The background color and the URL link color are too similar.
• Steve first talks about a news article and even excerpts it and then puts the URL link to it at the end of the post. A link to an article should come sooner in the post and the A HREF should span a few words to provide a larger place to spot with one's eye and click on.

I hope Steve is right that his chosen background color is soothing wild belligerent humans the world over. If World Peace suddenly inexplicably breaks out I know who I'm going to credit.

The guy who runs this blog is known as Lynxx Pherrett. Since Lynxx Pherrett is a catchier name than Assume The Position I think he ought to have named his blog after his pseudonym instead.

Okay, one big complaint about this blog: He italicises all excerpts he makes from articles that he quotes from. That makes these excerpts (which run for paragraphs) harder to read. Plus, any pre-existing use of italics in the quoted text gets lost. The indenting from the BLOCKQUOTE tag is already sufficient to allow one to identify text excerpts. The use of italics for this purpose is a bad idea.

Glenn Reynolds has of course become larger than life, InstaMan, Blog Father, Uber Pundit. How dare I question any blog site decision he has made in the face of his overwhelming blog dominance?

Well, first of all, as Glenn surely knows, no one dominates blog world. Secondly, I'm really hoping he'll fix a couple of things that obviously ought to be fixed.

First of all, his pop-up dialog boxes are not resizable. Why? Probably because that is the default for MovableType and he never changed it. When a comment list is long it really helps to be able to make it bigger to see more at once. That way it isn't as necessary to scrolls as often and messages that are in response to other messages can be compared to the other messages.

Second complaint: His permalink icon. I know what it is. But do all users? It also is sufficiently small that its harder to get the mouse over it than it is to get the mouse over, say, the text "Permalink".

She has no permalinks dammit!

Also, I think her main text column should be wider. Most people will come to the page with their web browser open wide enough to allow wider lines and hence fewer lines per post and hence more posts visible at once.

This is a stylish site. If Charles Johnson wants to say "Who are you to criticise my site. Just look at your site in comparison" I'd have to say he's right. Still, since the right to be a hypocrite needs to be exercised constantly in order to help defend it I feel compelled to review Little Green Footballs.

Okay, first of all, he uses a lot more vertical space per post than is necessary. The date/time, comments, permalink are spread out over 3 lines. Also, since all 3 of his columns are fixed width one can't widen the page as a way of getting the middle post column wider.

Charles claims his site is validated for HTML 4.0 Transitional. He says:

This page contains validated HTML 4.01 Transitional code, with a validated stylesheet. (Or at least it used to; but allowing visitors to comment makes validation impossible.)

But the W3.org validator finds problems in places that are not in user comments. So I would be curious to know what validator Charles uses and how recently he's done his validation.

Try this link to see HTML 4.01 validation on Little Green Footballs.

Still, this is a beautiful site and is functionally rich. He has made available some of his scripts he's written for managing his site. See the "Scripts" category in the left hand column.

Over in his left hand column "A few of my favorite things" the links are in orange against a green-gray background. Add in the font choice to make it even slightly worse and the contrast between the colors makes it harder to read the links than it should be. Charles, you are a biological scientist at Harvard with no doubt a very well developed observational abilities. Surely you have noticed your color contrast choice is far from ideal.

For perfectly understandable reasons lots people want to make their sites look unique. The temptation is to use color combinations that look attractive and that are used by few other sites. Well, the reason so many color combinations are rarely used and a fairly small number of color combinations are widely used is that most color combinations do not provide the good contrast that makes text easy to read.

Okay, back to Charles' blog: in the post body section he has light yellow-green text on a darker green background. The contrast is better than what he has in his links column. But it still could be improved upon. I would also suggest a change in font as well. Verdana,Arial is what Glenn Reynolds uses and I've patterned my own sites after the wise choice of the Blog Father (though I'm still using a less readable font in my links column).

I like the picture of the Gorilla (orangutan?) mother on the left cradling the baby. Very cool. Nice touch.

The pairs of double colons on the date posted/links line and at the top make for a mildy stylish touch. I don't understand why he provides his contact info on each post. If it was a shared blog maybe that would make sense (even then not absolutely necessary though).

Charles has a Stats icon at the bottom of his page. But you can't click on it to see his traffic levels since it asks for a password. For all other sites with similar icons that Ive tried to click thru on the result is immediate display of tables and charts of traffic history.

Another small complaint about stats icons: A lot of bloggers put them at the very bottom of their pages. I think it would be more sensible to put them at the bottom of one of their links columns.

His site is too wide and fixed width.

His text is too light. Chuck, use solid black for the text. Light color isn't neater looking. It is just what some of the blogging software temlates ship with as the default. Also, if you want a different background color for the excerpts then use a lighter grey in the background to denote the excerpted text from articles in order to increase the contrast between the text and background.

His Comments option runs some Javascript that opens a new window on Mozilla (at least a fairly recent build 2002100714) but there is nothing in the window. So Comments may not work on Netscape 7 either. Not sure but its a good possibility.

You know how you hate animated gifs on news sites that distract you from reading the text? (unless you are a freak who likes animated gif ads - in which case you are a mutational adaptation to the web). Those animated gifs are usually there to sell things. If annoying distracting moving stuff on web pages unless the moving stuff isn't an advert then it could be an entertaining animated gif cartoon or some other content meant to entertain. But Sounding Board has those flashing and moving objects just because the web site author wanted it that way. Go figure.

I'd tell you more about this site but I'd get dizzy trying to stare at it any longer. Sorry.

Update: Allan at Sounding Board appears to have dropped his animated gifs. Since I can now look at the site without feeling dizzy I'll say some more things about it.

He conveninetly has an Alta Vista Babelfish set of icons for translating his site into other languages. That's very nice. I've found entries in my referral logs which were for URLs that translated my own site into other languages. It is nice to see that one can put easy access links on one's site to make that easy for people to do. I just tried one of the flags and the translated result appears to be Italian. The fact that there are flags instead of text there for each of the language makes it hard to tell what language each link is for. Since, for instance, Spanish is the primary language for many countries it seems more sensible to include a text label under each flag icon. Or if character set support on different operating systems is a concern one might want to use an image of a piece of text instead. Still, this is the first blog site I've notice that has this feature right on it.

Another nice touch for the international nature of the internet is his (GMT+8) after each posting time to let you know not only when he posted it but from what time zone. Of course, unless you know how many hours off of GMT you are its not much good. But since GMT is in Britain its not too hard to guess that approximately. I'm guessing he's in the Pacific Standard Time that the West Coast of the US and Canada uses.

I find the color of orange he's using for not-yet-visited URLs to be a big hard to read. Its harder to read against the blue than against the darker background he uses on on some parts of his left column. Seems to me that one should coordinate one's foreground and background color use. Also, while I like the color of blue that he has as a background (Being so unartistic I don't know the fancy name for that color; kinda teal and sapphire) I think the level of contrast between it and the white text leaves a bit to be desired. Its not horrible or unreadable. I just think the contrast ought to be a bit greater.

Posted by Randall Parker at November 18, 2002 08:59 PM