This article is a response to Smashing magazine’s: Death of the boring blog post article
The article says ( what everyone realizes anyway) that most of today’s blog are boring as they all look the same and have mostly the same layout comprising mostly of text and some images thrown in.
What it suggests is that bloggers implement a system where the design centers around the content and they give up the use of a standard template for every blog post ,.This is very much like a magazine , where each and every page is carefully designed with perfect images and an appealing but not-always-standard layout, creating a sort of a ‘blogazine’.
Well , it’s a really nice effort to usher in a new way of looking at blogs but signaling it as the death of the classic blog post maybe going a bit too far.
Here are some reasons why :
Blogging has grown exponentially in the past few years and a blog has become almost a standard feature on most sites which provide new information on a constant basis (This is being superseded by Twitter but that too is merely a means of providing links to proper blog articles!) . However, the majority of blog writers are still individuals who seek to share information on the internet via their blogs
. For most of these bloggers, their blog is not exactly a ‘weblog’ but actually a website for themselves. This is because setting up a blog and putting out your content on the web is much easier than setting up a site
. Setting up a (simple)blog is a rather easy process requiring little or no knowledge of web technologies compared to the effort one would have to take to setup their own site from scratch
. This ease of usage has enabled hordes of people to share information quickly and permanently on the internet. This precisely is the reason most blogs look alike; they weren’t made by designers in the first place but just someone who wanted to get his information out there and did it with minimal effort.
The process of design suggested by the article is not exactly what a web design rookie might be able to execute.
The argument of the article may be more applicable on corporate or professional blogs(which aren’t the majority of course) which employ a professional web designer. In this respect , it would truly be remarkable if more blogs put this concept to use to design more elegant blogs which look attractive.
Well so what I am really saying is that boring blogs are here to stay!