« There. I said it. | Main | Fuck the "F-Word" »

I was reading Daring Fireball, (as should we all, John is just too good a writer to not be on the list of the entire IntarWeb), and in this missive, he talks about another article comparing the "look" of MovableType sites and Wordpress sites. John's basic thrust? It's not the software, it's the design(er).

I have to agree with him on this. Honestly, I chose MT for this sit based on two things:

1. It had, at the time, the best text import facility around. This was important to me for this and other things I was working on.


2. Since it is able to use a Berkeley DB back end, I can keep the entire site in two directories, and not worry about MySQL/Postgres issues. That's not a slam on those two database implementations, they're both excellent. But for my needs, BDB gets the job done, and lets me be lazy about it.

If any of you remember the god-awful initial design of this site, it is obvious that I am not much of a designer. I have no pictures or whatever of it, it was ugly and cumbersome. But I learned from it. I was thinking about the next design for bynkii.com when I read this article from Maddox. Now, Maddox is even more crotchety than I am, but he said a few things that resonated with me. First was this one:

It's an unspoken rule that every blog must use the same layout as every other blog: long, slender columns of annoyingly condensed text, thousands of links to other blogs, plugs for shitty political books, and more links to yet more blogs...

That was something I agreed with. Honestly, I wanted this thing to look more like what *I* wanted to see, and that had nothing to do with other blogs. While I do have a link list, it's something I add to or subtract from with a bit of thought. I don't myna-bird it, and if it only changes due to URL changes, that's fine with me. The next paragraph took on the "every other word must be a link" thing. (If I quote it, it loses its punch, so go read the original.) While I do like having links that reference specific things, it's something I use judiciously. For example, I didn't link to quite a few things in this article so far. Links should add to the information you are relaying, not be an attempt to replicate Wikipedia. 2039485723049587 links per column inch doesn't make your post better. In fact, it makes it suck. Really. His next point really hit home:

If the thousands of mid-sentence links don't annoy you, the long slender columns of text will. Most of the screen on a blog is blank for an imaginary populace of readers still using 640x480 resolution. I didn't buy a 19" monitor to have 50% of its screen realestate pissed away on firing white pixels, you assholes. They don't print books on receipt paper for a reason. Every time I see this layout, I want to choke the creator with my dry, crackled, and bleeding hands for making my fingers so calloused from having to keep scrolling the mouse wheel to read your dumb "blog."

Bravo, Bravo! Dear lord, there's nothing worse than trying to read a two-foot article that is only twenty sentences long, because the blog in question uses two inch paragraphs. This is one of the things I tend to wish John would think about on DF. 3" column widths are nobody's friends.

I started thinking of some other things. Mostly, how I like my text backgrounds simple. Black on white. Works well. I wanted a new logo, and after some thought, and far more work in Illustrator and Photoshop than anyone with talent would have needed, I came up with one. I spent more time on aligning the corner of the monitor and the text than anything. Dori Smith helped me out a lot, (no, really, a LOT), and then I just kept beating on it in GoLive until it was mostly what I wanted. There's some things I'll fix one of these days, but in the end, I got what I wanted: A clean site design with wider than normal columns. I based the whole thing on 1024x768 resolution, mostly so you can see the whole thing on a subnotebook. I tweaked the load order so that when I read it on a phone or other handheld, you get the text at the top, and the rest of the crap at the bottom. Makes for much faster load times, and avoids the shit that makes me want to kick the designers of Infosyncworld.com in the nuts. I did get a little wierd with the links, but then again, I find it nicer for me, and at the end of the day, this site and its design is all about me. Makes the focus group meetings go faster. I used statically sized column widths, but made it obvious where the links and other stuff were so you can easily avoid it. I just hate shit resizing all the time. (I would like to know why I never get the color bar on the right to work past the bottom of the initial window, but it's not a big deal.) At some point, I may widen up the main column, it's a little too narrow for me, and I may add some CSS for auto-tabs of the first sentences of paragraphs, and something nicer for insets and blockquotes, but that's a real low priority.

It's not perfect, and there's probably a dozen things wrong with it, but I find it soothing, and clear, so I keep it. Then again, I'm real lazy, so the fact I don't mess with the design often isn't really saying much.

Technorati Tags: about:me

Comments

Which brings me to the most annoying thing about bynkii.com: the fixed width annoyingly wide text. There's a reason every print publication under the sun uses narrow columns: they're easier to read!

Crotchety should never get in way of reason. That's the mistake Dvorak makes and Maddox is just another variant of the same.

Fortunately your content makes up for your lack of design and I'll put up with resizing my browser window every time I load your page.

(or you could make the width fluid and let the reader decide what width is most comfortable for them to read).

Posted by: Paul Turnbull | March 5, 2007 12:26 AM

Have to say, your columns are just a little wider than the Safari standard width. So it's just for your page that I resize the window. I agree with Paul: your content makes up for it, but it is something I'd rather not do.

Posted by: Suman Chakrabarti | March 5, 2007 11:15 AM

Newspapers use the widths they do, as do other paper-based publications for reasons that have little to do with readablity, and more to do with physical space. I've a number of different publications and the ones for whom space is not a premium? Wider column widths, in some cases, page wide. A random sampling of books show that they use page-wide settings as well, and I've not seen too many 1000+ - page magazines.

I'm going to hazard that the "Narrower is more readable" is a personal preference far more than a fact.

I have never found a fluid solution that let me reliably set minimal widths, which would be about what they are now anyway.

Posted by: John C. Welch | March 6, 2007 12:52 PM