Recent Blog Entries
Does your site have curb appeal?
Written by Tyme White on September 29, 2006
Curb appeal is the first impression someone has when they see a house from the street. Consider the first time a reader comes to your site curb appeal. What will they think?
Ok, I sense the anxiety. You’re not a designer. You’ve done your homework. You know The Design Master Mike Rundle will be looking at your site. You know sharp-tongued Scrivs will be looking at your site. I know, you read Scrivs called Microsoft, AOL, Netscape, Bloglines, SixApart and (gasp) Technorati losers and to top it off the 9rules Design Community has many of the best designers. I feel you. Have no fear, Tyme is here. I don’t believe I typed that.
Scrivs tells me all the time, “It’s ok Tyme, you’re not a designer” when I work on my site. One time doing an interview with Mike and Scrivs, I made the sad mistake of asking Mike what was the #1 design mistake bloggers made? He said “The header is not a link to the front page”. Scrivs could barely contain himself (laughing) because not only was my header not a link at the time, there was a typo in the header. Yes, that was a tip: make your header a link to the front page.
So essentially, my goof ups are benefiting you. You can thank me later. Yes, it’s okay to use WordPress (insert your writing tool here) themes. Contrary to the myth we do accept sites without custom designs. Here are some tips to spice up your site a bit:
- Change the default header graphic so it reflects your personality or if it is a company site, your brand.
- Tweak the links, it’s a nice way to bring some color to a site.
- Don’t blind your readers with lots of colors. You want the reader to focus on your content, not be crossed-eyed from all the colors.
- Sometimes it’s the little things that make a site standout. Leihu is a wonderful example. Every time I go to his site I find something new. Did you know he has a light and dark theme?
- Is your site easy to read? Tweak your fonts/colors.
Focus on your strength. If you aren’t a designer, do your best with the design but focus on writing exceptional entries.
September 29th, 2006 at 10:53 am
Using Leihu as an example in an article about accepting sites without custom designs doesn’t really help demonstrate your point.
September 29th, 2006 at 12:10 pm
Agreed.
: theres always a time to learn. (The best way is the hard way by creating havoc with your blog by messing with CSS)
Pimped up my blog design for the coming 9rules round. Tyme, I’m 16 year old Web Designer
September 29th, 2006 at 1:13 pm
Thanks for the mention Tyme, I appreciate it.
September 29th, 2006 at 3:28 pm
My site is using a very lightly modified version of Pool, one of the most common WP themes.
September 29th, 2006 at 11:52 pm
Hey, I hope that my blog is always welcoming. I spend a lot of time looking for a good image (I wanna look for creative commons images that are pink, btw, this month) and after that… I hope my content will do the trick (even if it’s not always HOT or COOL) – see my two last ‘boring’ entries.
So, the curb may look shaggy in a while, I’m doing my best to get something new and (sometimes) worthwile out there.
Long story to say: I’m writing for my readers, not for curb crawlers – although they’re always more than welcome…
Hey, Tyme, visit my Fkickr things and you’ll see I’m a weird boy already. Wanna do a funky design with me? I’m available and mostly free… :_) I’m a ‘designer’, though, and not a developer… Let’s see where ‘that’ gets us…
September 30th, 2006 at 9:06 am
Good call on James’ site.
Instead of making my whole header clickable I only made my title clickable.
September 30th, 2006 at 9:22 am
Ben - my entire header isn’t a link either. The blog name is.
Mal - I used James’ site as an example because for me, he’s an inspiration on what I would like to do one day. I was going to use Ben and James as examples but wouldn’t you know Ben changed his site design again.
If you’d like a plain example where actions spoke out more than design: michaelono.com. Michael is the Community Leader for Anime. He goes to great lengths to develop and try to add sites to community. He interacts not only in ours but in the anime community in general.
James - You’re welcome
September 30th, 2006 at 10:18 am
Meh, i’m still trying to modify mine again, but it’s going drastically awry.
*fumes*
September 30th, 2006 at 12:36 pm
Wow thank you Tyme! You’re too kind. But seriously I really don’t know much about design/coding to begin with.
For those of you who have good content should consider a wordpress theme that displays you’re work in the most straight forward fashion. I highly recommend the ,a href=”http://automattic.com/code/widgets/”>Automattic wordpress widget for those of you who don’t know much about coding. It’s a great way to organize site data and whatnot.
Good luck to all of you who are submitting sites to the anime community!
September 30th, 2006 at 12:37 pm
widgets ack see what I mean!
October 2nd, 2006 at 12:39 am
[...] A recent 9rules blog post talks about “curb appeal“. [...]
October 2nd, 2006 at 8:52 am
Correct me if i’m wrong but I guess content outweighs the design, right?
http://heateatreview.com of 9rules hasn’t modified the standard theme other than change line colours, but the content is cool and unique.
October 2nd, 2006 at 11:29 am
Milo, yes content definitely outweighs design. As I said in my example MichaelOno.com is an example where his actions and enthusiasm got him in. HeatEatReview’s site content got the site in. There are many different aspects and that is one of the things I hope this article series points out. But in the end, there is one common denominator: they are all passionate about what they do.
October 2nd, 2006 at 12:39 pm
Tyme, on the question of the header being a link, I don’t think its a mistake not to have the header image as a link to the home page…
You see the target audience of blogger sites is different form mainstream websites…
Most websites are designed with specific audience in mind and those people are not web savvy enough to know that the header is a link to the home page…
I understand mike is an expert in designing blogger sites, and blog sites are visited by web savvy people, who know that the logo or the header image is a link…. but if the audience is niche from a mainstream surfer, they are not going to know that the header is link to the homepage even if it is…. Thus they need to see, home link…
I think mike might be guilty of designing for designers
My two cents
October 2nd, 2006 at 12:53 pm
Actually I sort of proved this going mainstream. I asked people in the oddest places to surf through 9rules and other sites. People tend to look at the top of a page for a home link if they’ve navigated away from it. Now if you look at the 9rules page, the leaf is a link but we have a home link at the top, in the header. You have a home link in your header. The top right/left is fine too, but people tend to look up for the link and usually become irritated when they have to scroll down.
But don’t make the mistake of underestimating your audience. There are more sites with a link at the top portion of a site than not. In my case I didn’t do it because the theme I was doing had it as a background in the CSS and I didn’t feel link fiddling with it. And for the record, my audience is more mainstream than geeky blogger.
October 2nd, 2006 at 2:19 pm
LOL, you make some good points…. Tyme where is your personal site.. I thought there was a site called whitespace on 9 rules a while back.. was that yours?
anyways where is it now?
October 2nd, 2006 at 5:26 pm
Thanks
Mine is PingSix.com. This is funny…Whitespace was Scrivs’ site which is now at Wisdump.com. A lot of people thought that was my site.
October 3rd, 2006 at 6:41 pm
From blog title to blog design…
On the heels of my post about why I titled my blog System 13, I now want to dig a bit deeper in regards to how the title affected the looks of my blog.
After moving my blog to system13.wordpress.com, I wanted to get a nice custom theme up and running. …
October 6th, 2006 at 3:05 pm
Speaking of logos that click to the home pages; some really successful sites. do not have this…
paypal - did they forget? i dont think so…
October 6th, 2006 at 3:11 pm
Nolawi look at PayPal’s design. They have every link the user needs to navigate. No need to go back to the front page. Don’t look at it so subjectively. Look at how the person is navigating the site.
October 8th, 2006 at 1:22 pm
This post should be required reading for all bloggers! I actually know some professional blog designers who don’t make their headers link to the homepage. So annoying.
Sorry for all the comments at once. I’ve been gone for a bit and am just now getting caught up. I keep meaning to just read and not comment on the old posts, but I can’t help myself…
October 16th, 2006 at 6:25 am
Yups!. thanks for the article. Though common, but nice tips.
October 24th, 2006 at 11:38 pm
[...] Tyme White, the 9Rules site selector and co-founder, believes that content is king and she needs to be able to easily identify what your site is all about. She recommends tag clouds and she “dreads long archive lists” which tell her nothing. Since she has communities to fill, if she can’t quickly determine site content, she’ll not going to stick around to find out. Ms. White also mentioned she is looking for curb appeal. This is the first impression someone has when they see your site (or a house from the street.) [...]