» The Seven Most Commonly Made Bad Blog Design Choices

Unfortunately some of the most successful blogs on the internet today suffer from some of the worst design choices ever. I however do not blame the designers or the blog owners themselves, as a lot of these have become very common in blog design. My time spent browsing the blogosphere has allowed me to compile a list of the most annoying choices in blog design today.

7. Liquid Content Columns
I know that this is going to really upset a lot of developers, but liquid layouts rarely work. While there are a few sites out there that do it well, the majority of the sites that attempt it just suck. Unfortunately this is just not good typography, on larger resolution monitors the line length is just too long, and makes reading very tiresome.

6. The Post Calendar
Can we let this thing die already, no one uses it and all it does it show your visitors that you haven’t posted a new article in the last 12 days.

5. Tag Clouds
While the functionality of tag clouds is arguable helpful, unfortunately most tag clouds appear as nothing more than a jumbled mess. So messy in some cases that they are actually too hard to disassemble in a reasonable amount of time, and are just avoided by users.

4. Text Size Adjustment Tools
While you may think that leaving text size adjustment up the user is a good idea, in reality it just shows an inability to make a simple design decision. Users who prefer larger text sizes most likely have set their browsers to override your settings, making this “tool” useless anyways. Instead take the time to set content text with great leading and ample contrast, so that you can achieve great legibility without having to resort to huge text.

3. Third Party Widget Overload
While these widgets offer a ton of great benefits, and can bring great services to your users however without some customization they stick out like a sore thumb. Most of these widgets carry a very strong branding of their own that can clash with your blog’s branding and steal hierarchy away from more important page elements. This goes for social media tools as well, believe it or not but 3 or more of them look cluttered and amateurish.

2. Huge RSS Icons
Who put make my logo bigger cream on the RSS icon? I know that getting RSS subscribers is an important goal of blogs, however there is no need for them to take up a complete upper third of your blog. Enough said.

1. Next & Previous Pagination Buttons
In my opinion you should never use next and previous for your pagination on a blog. Next and Previous what? Is it the previous page, previous posts, or previous in time? Next and previous are extremely vague descriptions. Blogs typically are organized in chronological order so why not use a time based description such as newer and older, or avoid this situation all together and use a numerical pagination.

Disclaimer: Please realize that there are situations in design when any of the above scenarios could be used with great success, however in most situations my opinions hold true. That said, comment away, let me here your take…

03/18

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21 Responses to “The Seven Most Commonly Made Bad Blog Design Choices”

Alfred
March 18th, 2008 at 11:36 pm

We were all trying to figure out what does it say on your logo here at the office..

How ironic…
Eli
March 18th, 2008 at 11:40 pm

Good article, it all makes sense, and gladly I can say I haven’t made any of those mistakes (I don’t think!)

I panicked a little bit when I read the last one, I thought you might have meant the page navigation that sits at the bottom of the home page

Anyway …
Zinni
March 19th, 2008 at 4:38 am

Alfred,

I have received some mixed feedback over the logo for Positive Space. TH lack of counters within the type is to help convey the idea of “positive space.” I believe with my upcoming redesign that legibility of the mark will be improved.

I have learned a lot from this site, as it was my first step into real blog design. I however have not made any of the mistakes that are listed above (The contract in my body copy could be better, but I don’t think it’s horrible right now).
Chris
March 19th, 2008 at 7:10 am

I completely concur with all of those. Amen!
Erika
March 19th, 2008 at 9:18 am

I MUST agree wholeheartedly about the fluid design note. No one’s content area needs to extend to 1000px. It’s understandable to be interested in “filling the space,” but negative space is just as important.
Vinh Le
March 19th, 2008 at 12:39 pm

Interesting, I just wrote a similar article that touches on different areas though. Good article. I agree about the widget overload.
kristarella
March 19th, 2008 at 12:46 pm

The important thing with fluid or elastic layout would be to give a minimum and maximum width. Even so there is still only a few sites that pull it off - I can never open Smashing magazine in my feed reader because their sidebar is fixed and content is fluid so the content ends up being tiny (with the rss sidebar).

I ran into some troubles with the next/previous links when attempting a redesign. They didn’t actually go where I thought they should. From the very front page it was the “next” link that showed up to go to the older posts… we could probably blame that design flaw on the blog developers because its default nature is confusing.

It took me quite some time to find your RSS link, it’s nearly invisible ;)
Zinni
March 19th, 2008 at 3:18 pm

kristarella

I agree with you about my RSS icon, that is an area that I will be bringing more attention to in my next design, however it still isn’t gonna be massive ;)
Jacob Cass
March 19th, 2008 at 9:27 pm

I agree with you on most accounts however not the large RSS icons. As you can see on my website I use a large RSS icon and it does its job well. It reminds people to subscribe and puts it in their face. It’s telling them CLICK HERE But in saying this, you have to do it well. On my blog it is placed well and blends in with the design.
Matt
March 21st, 2008 at 2:45 pm

Good list but is “Older Entries” and “Newer Entries” much better than next and previous? It does answer next and previous what I guess. Do you think providing titles of the next and previous pages would be better? Or am I just being picky?
Zinni
March 21st, 2008 at 4:04 pm

Matt, In my opinion it is more about making sure that you have a clearly defined navigation. Providing the title of the next or previous page could work well from within an article page, however I do not think it would work on a homepage because you would just be navigating to the same page with older entries.

Thanks for your comment!
Matt
March 22nd, 2008 at 5:57 am

@Zinni, Good point. Thanks for the clarification.
Tom Okeefe
March 24th, 2008 at 10:15 am

5. Tag Clouds
While the functionality of tag clouds is arguable helpful, unfortunately most tag clouds appear as nothing more than a jumbled mess. So messy in some cases that they are actually too hard to disassemble in a reasonable amount of time, and are just avoided by users.

If used correctly it can work. I agree some sites have a huge amount of space wasted by having a Tag Cloud. On my blog. http://blog.mycardmywork.com I got sick of having a long category listing so I went with a Tag Cloud and so far it’s not all that bad.

4. Text Size Adjustment Tools
While you may think that leaving text size adjustment up the user is a good idea, in reality it just shows an inability to make a simple design decision. Users who prefer larger text sizes most likely have set their browsers to override your settings, making this “tool” useless anyways. Instead take the time to set content text with great leading and ample contrast, so that you can achieve great legibility without having to resort to huge text.

Why not make your blog be fully scalable by using overflow:auto to clear floats as done in my blog.

The person who developed my theme writes about the process here:
http://www.drunkenfist.com/304/2008/03/22/using-overflow-auto-to-clear-floated-content-in-css/

I agree with the other bad blog choices you outlined.

Cheers,
Tom Okeefe
jTaby
March 24th, 2008 at 10:45 am

While I agree with all of the above, I have reservations about #7.

I have a 20” screen, and a 22” screen, but I don’t look at websites at a ~42” width.

The point I’m trying to make is that people with larger screens have their browser windows small. The whole point of a big screen is to be able to see more than one thing at once.

It’s the same logic as “Users who prefer larger text sizes most likely have set their browsers to override your settings”

On a different note, you might want to consider the blog design mistakes in this blog: backgrounds in the textarea, illegible tag list, and low contrast in your forms.

(sorry I came off as offensive)
2balls
March 25th, 2008 at 1:01 am

A blog like this one cannot teach about webdesign…I thank this was a compilation of the “most commonly Bad Blog Design” Sorry.
Rob
March 25th, 2008 at 6:05 am

Just to clarify, Tom’s blog is fully scalable because I used ems and percentage for all measurement. Not because of the overflow:auto. I haven’t written up my experiences with em based measurement yet.
Tom Okeefe
March 25th, 2008 at 10:45 pm

Thanks Rob! :)
Pete White
April 21st, 2008 at 1:37 am

Fluid designs look bad on any site but especially one with a lot of text like a blog. I think you could even go as far as saying having a left hand navigation column is also bad for a blog because people are so familiar with the layout of the right hand navigation column for a blog.