Продолжая оглядываться на блогосферу, я часто вижу посты про дизайн, дизайн блогов и сайты с отличным дизайном. Обновив дизайн моего блог…

The user experience is primarily made up of four factors: branding, usability, functionality and
content. Independently, none of these factors make for a positive user experience; however, together, these factors are the main ingredients for the blog’s success.

A blog has the opportunity to provide a great user experience by:
• Effectively communicating the brand
• Strengthening two-way relationships
• Extending your market reach
• Providing functionality that makes sense and adds value
• Turning your site visitors into regular readers

A great blog design with a compelling online experience always happens naturally after you do your strategic research and planning to understand your visitors’ expectations.

Traffic is up and more!

You’ve made a good point. Usability is critical, and there is a misconception that “pretty” means usable, but it doesn’t. And beauty is in the eye of the beholder, as well as the designer. Many like clean, minimal looking designs, while others actually thrive on seeing cluttered and grunge looking blogs.

The design must match the content and purpose, without a doubt, and yes, it used to influence advertisers, but lately, they don’t have time to physically check sites. They just want the income. ;-)

What we really need to worry about is the day when feed readers can incorporate comments, so few will honestly visit our sites not “judge a book by its cover” because they are only seeing the feed content. When that happens, web designers will probably be designing feed designs not just screen designs, don’t you think? That will change things a lot.

On a side note, I use RSS feeders, but I still frequent most of the sites on a regular basis for things like commenting or just getting to read a post on something other than a blank screen. And if a writer is talking about a redesign, then I’m going to check in specifically to see it.

They seem to think web design matters, however Mr Frind is cashing cheques to the tune of $10M a year with his allegedly god awful site.

Traffic matters, not design.

Think of it this way: A car’s purpose is to take you somewhere. But would you buy a rusted old car instead of a shiny new Prius?

- I like to click through and read the posts directly on sites with great designs. There’s something about the whole aesthetic experience that boosts that post for me.

- Posts that are jammed with formatting and links are annoying to me in feed readers – they somehow seem more palatable on the blog’s page itself.

But when I first came to your blog (someone sent me a link), I read that post and checked your design. It looked enough good for me to hit the subscribe button.

You must be at least Jakob Nielsen to have me read something from such an ugly site: http://www.useit.com/

But in personal blogs i really prefer and recommend, less thinking about the blogs look, just blog…