Category Archives: Design

Blog Navigation: Archives Aren’t Good Enough

What can we do to make blogs easier to navigate? As they stand, it can be hard to find things in the archives.

Not everyone has read everyone of your posts as they came out, and people often want to return to pages they’d read before.

Date-based archives aren’t any help. They may be the least-useful of blog navigation techniques. Sure, there may be times when you want to see the posts from a specific month, but not very often.

Search forms are great, possibly the best navigation method used on blogs today, but you have to know what so search before it’s of any use.

Then you have tags and categories, which have their uses, but are just another way to sort data. You need to have tags and/or categories on your blog. They help people find what they’re looking for, though if you have 3+ years of posts in your archives, it may still take awhile to find the posts worth reading.

The posts worth reading…

Essentially, you want a place to highlight your best work, the posts that everyone should read. While you obviously still have a lot of good stuff in your archives, to be unearthed by readers when they need it, this page would have the posts you want everyone to see right away.

Thinking about this, I ended up building my Featured Posts page, which is essentially a yearly archive of a “Featured” category I use for this purpose. Here’s how to set it up.

My Featured Posts scheme helps, but it’s not the ultimate answer. It’s just one piece of the blog navigation puzzle.

The Highly Extensible CSS Interface Series

Authentic Boredom has recently published the final article in an interesting series of posts about CSS design. It’s by no means light reading, but it’s definitely worthy of your attention if you’re serious about CSS development. The Highly Extensible CSS Interface ~ The Series…

Are You Going Without CSS Tomorrow?

Tomorrow, April 9, is “CSS Naked Day,” or as I like to call it, “Back to The ’90s.” Today several hundred websites will comment-out their CSS files, and go without styles for the day. Why? The idea behind this event is to promote Web…

Smashing Magazine: Grid-Based Design

Smashing Magazine has recently released an interesting post on grid-based design. Grid-Based Design: Six Creative Column Techniques. Grid systems bring visual structure and balance to site design. As a tool grids are useful for organizing and presenting information. Used properly, they can enhance the…

The iPhone and Web Design

Apple’s iPhone and iPod Touch now account for over 70% of US mobile browser traffic. What does this mean for webmasters, and just as importantly, those who design as a business? With the increasing popularity of the iPhone, it’s becoming more important to make…

A Few RSS Icon Resources

Looking for a good RSS icon for your site? You could go with the standard one, or use a variant that looks similar, without being so unrecognizable people won’t know it’s an RSS button. GloryInLife’s 51 RSS Buttons

31 Professional WordPress Themes

If you’re serious about blogging, and are trying to run a quality blog on a specific topic, you need a good design. Ideally, you want to have a unique design, built by a designer, though you can get away with a pre-made theme if…

Design Spotlight: ZDNet

ZDNet has recently redesigned their website.

Design Spotlight: Schneeballsch8 – The Duo Blog

Schneeballschl8 is a very innovative German blog. It’s two blogs in one, displayed on both sides of the central “sidebar.” (I suppose it would be a centerbar…) Leif Langsdorf and Dennis Nicolai, the two web designers who run the blog, are represented by the…

Design Spotlight: Adii

Adii, the self proclaimed “WordPress Rockstar,” has redesigned his blog.