Study of Blog Designs

Trolling through a river of Twitter posts and I came across a link to a blog about a study on blog design - looking at trends in blog design, specifically with some of the more popular blogs.

It talked about how many columns were popular. What font sizes are typically used in headlines. What type of background to use - white with black text or vice versa. Typeface. CSS or Tables....

You get the picture. Without further ado, here are the results:

- large blogs require a multi-column layout solution (usually 3 columns suffice)(58%);
- layouts are usually centered (94%),
- layouts usually have a fixed width (px-based) (92%),
- the width of the fixed layout varies between 951 and 1000px (56%),
- 58% of the overall site layout is used to display the main content,
- CSS-layouts are used (90%),
- the background is light, the body text is dark (98%),
- the most usual (not necessarily most user-friendly) line length lies between 80 and 100 characters,
- Verdana, Lucida Grande, Arial and Georgia are used for body text (90%),
- the font size of body text varies between 12 and 14px (78%),
- Arial and Georgia are used for headlines (52%),
- headlines have the font size between 17 and 25px.

Let me ask you this. Who cares? How many people actually visit sites these days. Yea, they might come across it initially but if they want to follow the content, they do it in an RSS reader. So while there's all this chatter about blog design, trends, to-dos, don't do's, etc. let's worry about the content. Yea, it's good to have a clean and simple design that's not all over the place and one where people can find the content that's relevant to them but after all, it's about the content. Would you buy a car that looked good, but drove more like a Chevy Chevette? No.

Aesthetics are important, but it is what's under the hood that really matters