Frank Schulte-Ladbeck

How different is your site from the next guy’s site? Have you considered a new format for your blog?

I was discussing the state of real estate portals recently, when it was pointed out that we are reaching a “plateau of similarity”. Not long after reading this phrase in an email, I receive another email informing me that another site is adopting the features of two other popular sites. The move makes sense. You copy what works for others. Refine the element to make it work better for you. Then others copy your imitation; hopefully some will refine the element with a clever innovation to take it a step further. Eventually, we obtain a distilled feature that works at its optimum level.
    I am going through a site redesign at the moment, and I have been giving thought as to how a user may be able to explore a site faster, simpler. We want visitors to stay on our site, or at least subscribe to the feed, so we study the positions which work best. I found that at the top of the article/post works best for me, but I am still experimenting with different locations. Ads along the top of the page do better for me than in the sidebar, but I think that this may be due to overloading the sidebar, so I am looking into ways to minimalize the information in that location. I find myself stopping to study how different sites present themselves to me as a user. Did I notice all of the navigational elements the first time around the site? Did the advertisement engage me? Was I intrigued by the design? Does the design matter? Mainly, I navigate by habit. I typically visit certain sites each week, so I only maneuver through the areas that I need. Design becomes irrelevant to me when I am focused on the content, but the design may have caught my eye in the initial visit.
   
After pondering how visitors could move through my site, and researching how they do move through my site, I thought about how I could flip all of my elements on their ear to create something new. Could I remove the sidebars? How can a style a page to keep the user’s feeling like this post is different from the last, while keeping an essence of familiarity? I start drawing images of site layouts which would move beyond the normal blog. I am starting to consider how I could effectively create these layouts. One idea was inspired by the pdf from Seth Godin, “What Matters Now”. Each page has two columns with a horizontal line across the top, and a vertical line down the right side. The title was given in a box, which was styled differently for each article. The type of font, font size, and flow of each article was also an individual statement. I thought that this could make a great blog format. All of the typical sidebar info would have to be in the footer or the header. What about ads? Or maybe some other feature like a tag cloud. I could insert a box like you see in a newspaper/magazine article. This may not be considered practical for most bloggers; however, the effect on the user could be great.
   
My point is that you may be limiting yourself if you stay with the standard blog format. Maybe the standard format works for you. We  can go back to the refining theme mentioned in the first paragraph. The standard blog format works for a reason. As a publisher, you must consider which elements do work for you. Do you need a blogroll? What about the categories? Would shaking up the design ever so slightly for each post focus the user’s attention? I could see that altering fonts would cause a user’s focus to sharpen. They would want to know what is going on. I am becoming less enchanted with stuffing certain features into the sidebar or at the bottom of the post. I feel that a box within a post which contained the related posts may be more ffective than having them listed below the footer of a post. Another thing to consider is what would happen if the search engine directed the user exactly to the point in your post where they would find the answer to their inquiry? We would have to have a site that catches the user’s eye to keep them on the site longer.
 
   Take a moment to look at your site. Find ways to break the mold with the presentation. Then decide if your vision is feasible, and is it practical for the user. Information architecture of a site may need to be more fluid to meet user demands.

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