markhollands.com.au

First post!

I’ve been pondering about how I was going to setup my own blog, having taken a look at a wide range of blog designs and how to become a better blogger guides. Much of the advice for bloggers on the web seems to include the mantra, “Write about what you know”.

The theme of this blog is going to be about user interface design and information architecture. As this will be documenting my learning experience and career transition, I thought, what better way to design my blog than to document the interface design choices I make along the way. Not only will it give some of my early content a sense of continuity, but it will allow me to have a plain design to begin with and then test out ideas along the way.

I found that there was a lot of quality material about different aspects of blog user interface design on the web already. Jacob Nielsen’s academic articles on his Alertbox site, analysing the different weblog usability design mistakes, amongst other things. At the other end of the scale, Smashing Magazine has a collection of 45 Excellent Blog Designs. This is a collection of very pretty designs, many by graphic designers, which I found useful for looking at things as an overview.

But I still was struggling to analyse what made up a good blog design and how the different components could be used to achieve different results. After much deliberation I thought that I should try and fill the middle ground between these two extremes and also use this as an opportunity to introduce my blogging persona. So I am going to present a series of blog posts analysing different aspects of the blog as a user interface and so it isn’t a dry slab of text, I will throw in some case studies featuring some of the blogs that I read.