AEN UI

Why do I say that? This is not a “I haven’t been blogging since … and now I am” post, it is a rather different kind. What I meant was it is good to have a blog that is a blog, one that works, looks and feels like one.

A few days ago, I was watching a film I would not hesitate to say is the best I have seen in my life. I watched “The Pianist”, which told the story of the late Władysław Szpilman as a Jewish pianist in a Poland under the occupation by Nazi Germany. The film was secondarily a war story but somehow it was also very peaceful and soft. I was really touched by the film and the story it told and I felt released and inspired.

Though this has nothing to do with war nor music, it was what I thought about while in a peaceful state of mind. Blogs contribute a significant percentage of the total internet traffic but because they are primarily text-based and does not consume much bandwidth, we can say people are spending more time reading, writing and making blogs. WordPress, the most popular blogging engine, currently at version 2.5.1 at the time of writing has been the defacto weblog tool since I can remember using version 1+. The open-source community has developed WordPress into a tool so powerful that people are using it as a CMS to power medium scale websites.

What happened to the blog? I asked. The majority of WordPress blogs today are landfills of useless widgets and banners, make-a-few-dollars-a-month advertisements… partly due to how personal and easy to use blogs have become. How wonderful if blogs can be like blogs again?

When designing the theme for this blog, my intention was to keep the essentials and leave out the unnecessary stuff. So I asked myself some questions.

“Do people really need to know how many comments a post have?”
Good to know but not essential. You just need to know at the most if the article has comments at all. When people have something to say, they don’t need the monkey-see-monkey-do kind of persuasion.

“Do I need a sidebar?”
Back in the days of print media, layout columns were used to limit the widths of bodies of text to aid legibility and in conjunction with grids to arrange information. On the web today, they are used solely for arranging information, with the sidebar for miscellaneous stuff. When you get too left and right, you lose certain freedom in the design of a layout. So I thought, if I have no miscellaneous information then I don’t need a sidebar and I can rely on the grid.

“Do I need a contact form?”
Most people are definitely more comfortable with composing a message in their favorite email client than fiddle with a clumsy web form, no matter how well-designed it is. People also have more control over formatting and attachments in an email client.

“Do I need social-bookmarking buttons?”
Most people who are serous about submitting your article already know how to submit and if the article is good, people will share it, without the need to overwhelm them with buttons. Social-bookmarking buttons are hardly effective and make a site look desperate.

“Why are comments on other blogs usually boxed and visually separated from the original post and each other?”
I guess the reason is to differentiate the comments from the post and to make it easy for people to find them. To me, posting an article is like giving a speech in public and comments are like replies from people. It really is a simple conversation. People don’t need to wear a special t-shirt (saying “comment author”) to take part in the conversation, they just talk!

“Why small text?”
The most common body text size online is 12 pixels, which is the recommended minimum. Designers go for this minimum because bodies of text look (not read) better by resembling patches of color and thus more coherent with the overall layout. I’m currently using a 17 inch MacBook Pro at a display resolution of 1920 x 1200. 12px at on this screen looks as if it is 10px on smaller screens. I know that not everyone uses such high resolutions but wouldn’t it do everyone a favor if text was large enough and comfortable to read? I settled at 15 pixels which I think is just right. Because I am setting font size with ems, people can resize text easily in all browsers to their liking.

There is a lot to gain from making websites simple. The process is like unboxing a present. You remove the ribbons, greeting card, gift wrap, cardboard box, bubble wrap, bells & whistles and finally you get to what matters most.