Blog Design and Interface

As everybody has already noticed, I've been making a lot of edits to the design of the blog since last wednesday. Now I think I have almost everything ready so here you have a post on the entire process I went through in order to arrive to this solution.

As with every web project, I started off (even before thinking about anything else) trying to structure the information into different levels (according to usability and interface, this means the amount of times that the user has to click in order to arrive to the information that he or she is interested in).

With this in mind I created a framework or map of the Blog, dividing the information into the different levels wich I thought were important.

Now I'll try to explain myself.

For starters, a blog is not like an actual webpage so the homepage has already "embedded" with lots of information that you wouldn't normally see in a site (meaning an introductory page). That is why on the first level of information we have 4 menu buttons. Which would translate as the 4 main subjects of the blog.

For this menu buttons I tried to use names wich are as closer to the content of the page as possible to eliminate any kind of confusion. That is why the page posts, is called posts and not home (I believe that blogs have no homepage).

If you analyze the posts page, you'll see all of the sub-menus come into scene.

In order to make access to information easier, I took advantage of the sidebar. This way the information is always available independent from where you are inside the blog (it doesn't matter if the user is in the page with all the posts or inside an specific url within the blog, the access to these assets will be always available). In terms of usability this is an advantage, and prevents the end user (wether is us or somebody else) of digging into subsequent menus in order to find the information that he/she may find useful.

Apart from including blogger default gadgets I also "embedded" external applications for the same reason, you don't need to create new pages in order to have this information available, since it will always stay on the sidebar.

There are a lot of ways in which the end user can find information that is useful. I added 3 gadgets for that purpose, the search bar, the blog archive, and the labels (tags). I did this in order to once again facilitate the access to specific themes/information/subjects to the end user.

Right now, I just added this few gadgets, applications, and external links; but we have to keep in mind that this is an ongoing process and this sub-menu can always change. One of the things that comes into my mind is that we can add a photo gallery, or even a video log after we return from the trips, but that is for us to agree on it and see if we find it useful.

You'll also see that I've put 2 about buttons, in my opinion I think that it is important to differentiate what is social business from the actual purpose of this blog (although they are both related, they are still different concepts).

One thing that I eliminated was the contributors gadget. I transformed it into a page (menu item) of its own, since we are already preparing a profile for each one of us, this page could contain that same profile, including a picture of each one as well as a link to our different webpages (in case we have one). This will add up, and it's a resource for anyone that wants to investigate more about the authors and the blog itself.

The colors are chosen following the palette that we have been using so far (red, gray and dark gray). The only thing that I changed was the typography of the post titles to make them stand out a little bit more. Once again, this is subject to modification, we have to discuss and agree in which colors best identify us as a group or as a course.

One thing that is very important is that we ALL have to agree on the visual aspect of the blog to make it consistent. How are we going to put the images; always on top? Always on the bottom? Are they going to go all toghether? What font size should we use for sub-titles?. All of these questions have to be taken into account to make our blog visually consistent. You'll see that I have re-"designed" some of the posts in order for everything to look more or less the same, but we should try to embed this way of thinking and apply it from the beginning of the process.

Another thing is, how are we going to do the labeling? From my experience I think is better to tag word by word instead of using frases or compound words such as social bussiness. This also will give us a very clear visual reference of what are the words (concepts) that we are tagging more (therefore writing more about) when we see the Tag Cloud.

Once again, all of these questions are subject to change, I'll wait for your comments, critiques, etc. In what is it that you think we can do in order to improve the blog not only design wise but also the way we use it...

Hope that I explained myself (I'm not really good at writing)