Weblog Tools Collection

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I came across an article by Mark Boulton at A List Apart. He writes about the importance of micro and macro whitespace.

To put it simply, whitespace on a page is everything that isn’t the content. By content I mean text, images and other design elements.
Micro whitespace is the space between lines, characters and smaller elements on your page. Macro whitespace is between major elements, like blocks of content etc.
Micro whitespace plays the role in ensuring legibility and macro whitespace gives you the feeling of breathing room and cleanliness.

Before the popularity of CSS, most of the styling was with font, bold and italic tags. Most sites had standard font sizes (usually 12pt) and standard whitespacing.

Once CSS became popular, almost all design elements could be styled. Spacing between characters could be easily changed, as well as line spacing. Cross-browser and cross-platform incompatibility resulted in pages looking good in some browsers and extremely pathetic in others. Reduced line-height and font-spacing resulted in cramped text. Text became illegible and even good articles became a real pain to read.

Mark’s article brings to focus how whitespace can actually make a differnce. He cites two examples; one of Erik Spiekermann’s redesign of The Economist and the second of brand positioning while designing graphics.
He then goes on to explain the use of active and passive whitespace in a simple article with pictures and examples.

I think the article is a must read for both theme and graphic designers. I plan on implementing some of his suggestions in my designs as well as my websites.

Let me quote his closing paragraph:

Once you know how to design and manipulate the space outside, inside, and around your content, you’ll be able to give your readers a head start, position products more precisely, and perhaps even begin to see your own content in a new light.

The article »

Avoid funky, overdone, extreme overpopulation of code and information.
We are all guilty of this, no doubt about it. But if your page opens up a virtual window everytime someone mouseovers the main page, you have gone too far. You want your site to look nice, be easy to navigate and attractive enough to come back to. Thats all that matters. If in the process you write compliant code which follows standards then kudos go to you. But quit with the flash and javascript effects already. Thankfully, I have come across only a few sites which include flash in a blog, but that time is sure to come.
Code is a boon and a curse in many ways. The main purpose of a blog or a webpage is lost in the translation.
The original CodeProject webpages are good examples of excessive amounts of information cramped into a very small space. URI navigation was invented for just that purpose! Organize links, nest links in other pages and make navigation simpler to use. Every bit of useful information on your blog does not have to show up on the front page. I really do not want to point out any particular blogs but you know who you are (including me :-p). Organize, Organize, Organize. If the site is too busy, it is less usable, less friendly and certainly less fun to read. All of this is said in spite of my main blog, which is overpopulated at the moment.
Good examples of organization in a blog include Matt’s Photomatt.net, Anil Dash’s main blog, Ringnalda’s blog and many many others.

I would have thought not. My belief was that if you site has been providing good content for a while and has regular readers, a slightly less usable presentation style or an ugly theme might let you get away with it for a while. I also believed that users are forgiving and will be willing to look overlook cosmetic design weaknesses when visiting a blog with powerful content. I was forced to think again.
I was dead wrong!!
Let me explain myself. I had switched the CSS of this site because of problems I had had with the CSS that I was using (which is back to where it was, mind you). The old CSS did not scale well and was not very pretty under Internet Explorer. Surprisingly, the number of hits fell considerably with that change. Not only did the number of uniques fall, the number of people willing to browse the site to find other entries and posts fell as well. I now have had the time to fix the CSS a little and it is back to where I like it. In accordance with my discoveries I have compiled a list of items I believe are important when choosing a design for your blog or site.
Mind you, I am not a standards Nazi but have slowly come to see the light. I believe in casual adherance to the standards and not a neo-fascist approach. I do not condone extremism in any shape or form (in web design at least).

That being said, the first golden rule of good web design is
Make sure you view your page from every browser possible, even Mac browsers.
People forget that not everyone falls into the Windows user category. There are hundreds of thousands of Mac users out there and if you want your blog to be read, we will come to read it. A slightly malformed page is much better than a completely disfunctional blog that is impossible to read in a Mac. There are lots of wonderful resources out there which lets one setup different CSSs for different browsers. Spend that extra 20 minutes and get the site Mac compatible. No blog is complete or can be without being available to Mac users. Same goes for Linux. Here is a Javascript solution and here is an HTML solution. Here is way to test in different browsers and here is a way to install many versions of browsers on your machine. Here are some of the CSS bugs categorized by browsers and Operating Systems.
I am sure there are many other useful resources out there. If you use any, please leave a comment for others. This is the first in a series of Golden Rules that I will try to put together on this blog, so stay tuned. Suggestions and comments welcomed.