Blog design Smashing Magazine: second part of the blog study online
Last update:
Reading time:
1 minute
Tags: Smashing Magazine, studies
After the first part of the blog study by Smashing Magazine went online last week, the second part is now also available. After layout and typography, this time it is about structural and technical elements. Here are some (but not all!) results:
- A left navigation bar is very rare for blog designs (12%). More common are a navigation on the right and at the top.
- There are big differences in how many posts are displayed on the home page.
- There is no general trend towards information that I would like to call “meta-information”: this includes related posts, latest comments and most popular posts.
- Advertising is common on blogs (on average 5.84 ad units on the front page). However, it is relatively rare within posts.
- Direct integration of social internet services is popular, but not yet standard (54%).
- Tag clouds are very rare: 90% of blogs prefer to use a navigation structure.
- Sadly, 96% of blogs do not conform to standards and thus do not meet the technical requirements for proper web design. Unsurprisingly, the renowned web design magazine A List Apart is the laudable exception.
Very interesting: the authors argue that right navigation bars accommodate a larger number of users than left bars. They assume that the mouse pointer is often in the right half of the screen because most users are right-handed. In addition, the scrollbar on the right is often used if the mouse does not have a scroll wheel. An interesting idea, but one that contradicts most other studies, which favor left-hand navigation columns. Should blogs function according to different rules than “normal” sites? It would be interesting to investigate this…