Hold on to your hats, the blog is changing (kind of)

When designing a website many people are tempted make it look as impressive as possible. Sparkles in the background, a funny font (maybe comic sans would work!), flashing colors, a cute picture. Unfortunately by designing a site this way you usually end up with the most god-forsaken ugly webpage that any one has laid eyes one. At that point it doesn’t matter how good your sites content its because people are going to take one look at your homepage and head for the hills. A webpage is like a introduction paragraph for a essay, or the first chapter of a novel. Its job is to draw your reader in and bring them the content of your site in an easy efficient manner. Because this is the sole purpose of your web design it doesn’t need to be needlessly complex or a work of art. It just needs to work. In this case the simpler the design is the better it works, the easier to use the more likely people will use it.

Now it I take this description to my own blog I can see it passes most of the interface tests. Its easy to use and can be figured out at a glance. It isn’t needlessly showing or complex. The design is acceptable and the colors match well enough so that the site is not unpleasant to look at. The professionalism on might site is a serious issue though, many or my journal entries are riddled with grammatical errors. The font could also be more appropriate and the titles of each writing piece are not always indicative of what the topic is. I will now redesign my blog In according to my criticisms.

“One hour later”

What has surprised me the most is that not much has changed in my web design. When I created this blog I chose the background very carefully, I wanted to find one that was humorous and would fit nicely in the bog format. After digging through all of my pictures I could not fit one that fit better then my current one. I changed the colors around but found that the scheme I liked best was my original. The things I did change however I think have improved the blog by just a bit. The first thing was font. I changed everything to a nice standard times new roman. While it is not the prettiest font to look at it is however the standard font for a reason. That reason it that times new roman is very pleasant and very easy to read. The next change was going back and giving all of the blog entries appropriate titles. Without them my reader would have no clue if a particularly entry was about until they started reading it. That was just inefficient and needed to be changed. The final thing I changed was formatting. Some of my words in were crossing over the color lines on the blog making them more difficult to read. So in the end no major changes happened to my blog, but the small changes that I made seemed to have enough impact.