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What’s Not Hot This Year in Blog Fashion Trends

What’s Not Hot This Year in Blog Fashion Trends

Can you imagine wearing bell-bottom pants today? I’m not talking about slender bell-bottoms that are in fashion today, but the ones that shot out a foot from either side of your ankle and dragged on the floor as you walked, making voom voom noises as the fabric flapped between your legs. Combined with the 3 inch thick cork clogs you wore, and tied died, torn t-shirts, you were your own audio and visual marching band. Would you wear those today and feel en vogue?

What about hoop skirts? Imagine wearing a hoop skirt, your head piled 2 feet high with hair, and getting into a subway today at rush hour? Totally inappropriate fashion for today’s lifestyles, right?

Well, there are tons of websites still wearing fashions that are more than 10 years out of date.

Do you resemble that remark?

Recent, I wrote about called “Things I Want Gone from the Web in 2007“, which took a stab at outdated website fashions. If you want to wear the latest in blog fashions, you need to know what is seriously out of step with the hottest trends in online styles and “glammer”.

  1. Popup windows of all types and kinds, including link web page previews and javascripted windows for forms are off the fashion charts as dated. Popups are the bell-bottomed pants on web pages. Annoying, visually noisy, and totally out of date.
  2. Visiting a secondary page to comment is so old fashioned. Keep comments and comment forms on your blog post so the conversation stays connected with content.
  3. Forcing readers to jump through hoops in order to comment has seriously past its expiration date in fashions. There are powerful comment spam fighting tools out there today, like , so you don’t have to test your readers before they comment.
  4. Comment spam is also totally not hot this year. Any comment spam found on your blog just shouts lack of fashion sense.
  5. Out-of-control advertising is covering our blogs from head to toe. Stop it. It’s like wearing the top twenty fashion styles all at the same time. Nothing makes sense, it’s hard to look at, and, honey, it’s a serious fashion faux pas. Not every blog needs to make money. And, hey, advertisers! Pay attention! Your ads are ugly! Make them look like something someone wants to click and not like comment spam! Got it! Good!
  6. The days of auto-reloading pages is gone. Stop it. If you have to have content that cycles during a visitor’s visit, then put it in a javascript or AJAX script so the content stays where it is and the whole page doesn’t have to reload. It’s a bandwidth waster and very frustrating when a page reloads in the middle of reading it.
  7. Websites and blogs which play “background” music for you to read by is 10 years out of fashion. The same with things that dance and move on your blog. It’s like women who still wear big hair and poofs. Past due. Dead. Old fashioned. And in many instances, criminally nasty.
  8. Link lists without content also screams horrid lack of style sense, like blond roots on fake brunettes. Oooo icky!
  9. Link spawning is so passé. Forcing links to open in new windows died off about four years ago in popularity. It doesn’t comply with web or accessibility standards, and makes your blog look stuck in the 90s.
  10. Is your blog stuffed with Flash? This is like wearing fashion knock-offs. While Flash, videos, podcasts, and other all media content is cool and looks good, without the words to back up the content, it’s like off-label styles. It looks good but doesn’t work right. Search engines and readers are still stuck in text, so give them the words to help them identify your visual and audio content, putting the name back in your fashion style labels.
  11. Stop wasting bandwidth. We live in a new green economy and fashion generation where waste is an unforgivable fashion trend. Wasting time, bandwidth, money, energy…stop the waste that comes with duplicating each other’s content, stealing content and images, blog bling icons, and visual noise. Stop emailing billions and billions of crap to each other. Do all you can to stop comment spam from slamming your servers and databases and keep it out of the public eye. Clean up and minimize your blog’s lifestyle and fashion style. Think quality over quantity.

And if anything should appear in the web fashion world this year, it should be a trend in getting back to the basics. Remember when even having a web page was valuable? When it was a place to let your voice be heard and to have your say?

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Today, blogs are giant mimeographs, photocopying each other’s content and subject matter. Look deep within your heart and soul and find your voice, the one begging for the chance to share its words with the world. Let that be one the one heard and showcased on your blog.

If anything is in fashion this year for the blogging world, it’s “you”. The personal you. The real you. The you that blogs, and blogs in style.


Lorelle VanFossen blogs about blogging and WordPress on and author of Blogging Tips, Tips Bloggers Won’t Tell You About Blogging.

View Comments (7)
  • Getting rid of the permanent Techaddress trackback, a feed scraper, under every post might become the new black.

  • Yeah, funny thing about TechAddress … they started out as a blog which was scraping feeds, and now they’ve mutated into a Digg clone which scrapes feeds.

    I’ve marked all of their trackbacks as “spam”, notified them in person, and wait to see that all of their “submissions” from the BlogHerald are removed.

    Cheers
    Tony.

  • Blogger blogs all make their comments forms open in a pop-up window. I hate it.

    But I disagree on “link spawning.” I tracked it, and on my blog, when I have things open in a new tab/window, people come back to my site when they’re done(I can see, they then click on other things). But when a link brings a reader to a new page which replaces my content in the window, the visitor is more often gone forever.

  • Actually, this is a major complained-about issue. It also breaks web standards for accessibility unless you warn the user that the link will open in a new window.

    With tabs, people are complaining about this even more as they think the link is broken when they don’t see anything – and then get angry when they find they opened a ton of tabbed windows behind the rest of their tabs.

    It’s been bad manners for many years, and now it is out of fashion, whether you like it or not.

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