Ikiru Design

When WordPress 2.5 came out, I was thinking I’d offer a narrative of “how I stopped worrying and learned to love WordPress 2.5.” That ended up being a little dull. Instead, because we’re always told that the internet loves lists — and at this late date it seems unreasonable to offer something more comprehensive — I’ve got a short enumerations of the good and bad.

Good

• A New Look — Though I wouldn’t say that all aesthetic changes made to WordPress redound to the good, I’m satisfied. The new colors are nice, the dashboard’s been improved, and everything feels better.
• Much Better Tag Integration — This is a direct descendant of the above point. Now a list of entries shows the tags. Now we get tag suggestions. And the ability to edit tags as a group. All of these are big improvements over the piecemeal support for tags that felt tagged on to 2.3.
• Better Media Integration — Though I’ve heard — and share — some discontent with the new Flash uploader, it’s nice that it was rethought. The ability to easily upload many pictures, and to easily create galleries are nice changes.
• Crucial or Trivial Bonus: Plays nice with Safari/WebKit — Anyone who tried using Safari with WordPress before will understand what a nice change this is. Anyone who hasn’t tried will think this is a silly point.

Bad

• The Bugs — This may be based solely on the fact that I use custom fields, but I’ve been having terrible trouble with both scheduling posts and the unnecessary creation of extraneous drafts. These sins can be forgiven, but I am getting rather impatient waiting for a fix.
• The New Look — A lot of changes to the Write page are for the better, but the dearth of white space on the right side confounds me. Catergories were there previously, and I think there was a number of good reasons for that. Tags, I think, should go there as well. But neither’s there. As I sidenote: I’m not really a fan of this Lucidia Grande business in the editor either.
• Change is Hard  — This is more a personal problem, but a lot of people (myself included) have been and slow to accept 2.5. This innate resistance to change is both irrational, and a waste of time.

I’m certainly not going back, and am even less likely to change blogging platforms, so all of this is essentially trivial. But now you know.

The epic showdown. Two titans of free internet content-management will meet in this arena. Only one can emerge victorious.

Two things should be made clear at the outset: (1) I was looking to make a link blog, not a typical tumblelog with multiple kinds of posts, all formatted differently; and (2) I eventually chose (self-hosted) WordPress. Yes, I just killed the drama. But this is about a comparison, and not (as I implied in the last paragraph) about winners or losers.

There were, three battles in this war. The first is the one that only matters to the proprietor: the back-end. This focuses primarily on how easy it is to create and edit entries for such a blog. Second, and what was the deciding factor for me, was archiving. That is: how easy it is to find what you want among the old stuff. The final issue is rather nebulous, but we’ll call it flexibility. That being whether each CMS can do the splits.

The Back

This is, without question, the place where WordPress loses a lot of points. And where Tumblr shines, especially if you’re looking for more than a link blog.

Tumblr’s backend is stylish, as the image at right demonstrates. I could go all the way to elegant and perhaps beautiful. Essentially you select the kind of post you’re going to be making, and then you’re taken to a specific page that’s tailored for making that kind of post. If you haven’t played around with Tumblr, it might be worth signing up just to see this.

WordPress, on the other hand, is a hulking CMS which can do lots of things. But it’s not terribly elegant at any of them. The way I create a post for my link blog demonstrates well. On the top the title, post text, and tags are entered. Then the link is added down at the bottom in the “custom fields” area. In which I’ve had to create a custom field called “link,” in which I put URL I want this entry to point to.

The use of custom fields — by definition separate from WordPress’s normal working — also makes it slightly hard to style entries properly, and harder still to make the feed act correctly (a problem I still haven’t fixed on my blog). I don’t need to go into detail, but suffice it say that it’s a headache.

Advantage Tumbler

The Archives

This is where WordPress, comparatively, shines. And the reason that I decided to throw my lot in with the ugly backend of WordPress, rather than the snazzy ease of Tumblr.

Tumblrs archive (see random example) look nearly as fresh and innovative as Tumblr’s backend. When I first saw one I said: “Wow. This is cool!”

And even though all those statements are true, Tumblr’s Archives are troublesome. For one, I’m not a fan of horizontal scrolling, which any reasonably old blog would have. And the only way to search such archives is with a browser’s built-in search fuction — which works, but is hardly elegant. And the ability to navigate with tags, of which I’m becoming an ever bigger fan, is completely out as well.

By contrast, WordPress is built for archives. The archives page I’ve thrown together for my nascent link blog gives you some ideas. There are tags there, as well as categories and monthly archives. Sure there’s a lot less flash than Tumblr’s page, but this has something else that Tumblr doesn’t. The ability to search. Built-in. And search plus all the ways you can view a WordPress archive means a lot to me.

Advantage WordPress

Flexibility

As I mentioned at the start, this a rather nebulous category. It encompasses most everything that I haven’t mentioned but feel the need to.

Both Tumblr and WordPress have a large array of themes. For the purposes of tumbling or linkblogging, Tumblr’s better in this. As for the novice, some seemingly-complex things have to be done to any WordPress theme to make it work at all.

Both tumblr and WordPress can exist at their own domains (though the tumblr default is X.tumblr.com, it can be easily changed). Having said that, all Tumblr backend work happens at tumblr.com.

Also, if one is reasonably skilled, it should noted that WordPress can do much more than Tumblr. But many, not even myself, are reasonably skilled.

So for the novice Tumblr is probably a wise choice (note that I’m not wise), you can’t do many of the things that WordPress allows you — seperate pages, for example — but the ease-of-use is hard to beat.

This is hard to call, so I’ll go ahead and do it the easy way:

Novice: Advantage Tumblr

Level 3 Nerd: Advantage WordPress

Conclusions

This contest is hard to call. Each CMS got 1.5 points out of three. As I suggested, I would decide this based on nerdiness. If you’re comfortable with CSS, HTML, PHP, and WordPress, I think that’s the obvious choice. If the acronyms in the last sentence confused and disoriented you, Tumblr’s probably a wiser bet.

Forced to choose an overall winner, I think I’d choose Tumblr.

The only reason I’m not currently using it is that dislike it’s archiving system. And that I like the possibility for future improvement when I finally get smart and motivated enough.

I hope I clinched the choice for you, affirmed what you were alreay thinking. Neither system’s terrible. Neither systems perfect. It’s just important to choose the best one for your needs and abilities.

I recently redesigned my non-design blog, Frozen Toothpaste, and did it with a variation of the BWO_one theme. At first I was very hesitant to go with a BWO_one variant because it meant that I’d lose the sidebar which the theme I had been using, Chris Pearson’s Copyblogger had had. It was some of the arguments that I’ll present here that convinced me that that would be OK.

Now, I should be clear that this is not an argument that no blog (or other website) should have a sidebar. I think they’re incredibly useful in a lot of cases. When I surf the blogosphere, I tend to favor the sidebar as a way to get around.

But the sidebar’s usefulness gives way to one of it’s biggest flaws: the clutter problem. Bloggers — who tend to be novice designers — tend to dump anything and everything into the sidebar. Most people probably have seen this problem before, but if you doubt me go spend a little time looking though blogspot.com or wordpress.com, you’ll notice what I’m talking about.

The problem starts benignly when a new blogger will say: “I want a little note to be easily visible,” and they’ll dump it into the sidebar. They’ll say “I want a RSS subscription button (or perhaps one for every feedreader known to man)” and that’ll go in the sidebar. They’ll create multiple blogrolls, and then a few images and maybe some links to their own content. And they’ll ad a last.fm widget, and a flickr widget, and a translations widget, and the “awards” they got from other bloggers. And it’ll all go into the sidebar. By the time they’re done no one wants to see, let alone click on the cluttered mess that resides where a simple sidebar used to.

I’ll readily admit that this story is a slight exaggeration. Many sidebars are manageable while they contain all the desired content. But that doesn’t change the fact that sidebars have latent tendency to become ugly and unmanaged clutter magnets.

Another strong argument for banishing the sidebar is that, especially but no exclusively when weighted down with moving widgets, they’re a hideous distraction from your writing. This may not be a concern for some bloggers, but I’d bet that the vast majority of people who blog do it as a way to practice, polish, and improve their writing. You want readers to look at and comment on what you’re writing, not be whisked off to yet another blog.

It not that a sidebar is an unavoidably bad, or that it shouldn’t be used. The issue is primarily that one must consider if they really need a sidebar. If you don’t it’s far better to use a design without a sidebar than to persist in having one that offers no function you desire.

There are risks in eliminating it certainly. But for every visitor that’ll be turned off by your lack of a sidebar, at least one more will be interested enough to try to see why you’ve eliminated it. It’s not that ever site should either have or not have have one, but every person designing for blogs should think about their merits and problems before making more of them.

The Economist is without question my favorite newsmagazine. Where Time and Newsweek have spent a great deal of that last decade covering more about trends and celebrities, The Economist stays nearly as constant and high-minded as its title would suggest. And though both of those traits can sometimes be bad things, in this case I quite like them. No other publication gives you regular updates about what’s happening in so many places around the world. And I feel confident in saying that no one on the entire planet (with the possible exception of its editors) knows everything in an issue of The Economist before they read it.

Having said all of that, the magazine’s website is a little drab. Though I like the simple functionality of the “current issue” page, it’s not exactly a groundbreaking layout. The frontpage is also admirable-but-boring, giving you a quick snapshot of some of the sites freshest and most interesting content while doing a great deal to prevent the overload that comes from many magazines and newspapers.

But I recently ventured into the publication’s rather modest blog section, and I feel confident in saying that I understand why the commenters are so few and far between. The section feels rather like an afterthought.

But the biggest problem The Economist’s blogs seem to have — and this isn’t a problem particular too them — is that they look so darn boring. Their economics blog, Free exchange, does a very admirable job highlighting the problem. Upon loading the page, my first though was: “I’m supposed to read this!?” And remember: I’m an ardent fanboy of this publication.

Now before I lay into The Economist too hard, I will readily admit that I experience this often with blogs, even my own (which any fool could tell you I value much more than those of others). Large blocks of smallish text, especially in a readable-but-slightly-dull face like Verdana or Arial, is a sure way to make me think a little before reading. And as anyone experienced in the use of Digg of StumbleUpon can tell you, that second’s hesitation may well send away over half of those who arrive on the page.

Now I dislike those that to tell you that you should front-load a post with photos and pull-quotes and other eye-catching tricky to convince fools to stick around. But after looking at the blogs of The Economist I know understand the advice in a way I didn’t before. I would never advocate pictures for every blog and entry, but they can certainly make things seem a little less drab.

To avoid giving the canned “use pictures” advice, I’ve thought of a few ideas that I think could help improve the blogs of The Economist and probably could improve yours as well.

• Subtitles for blogs. The first sin Free Exchange commits is that it doesn’t tell me what I’ll find there. If I’m a quick thinker, I may make the inference that the title probably refers to something like commerce, trade, stock markets, or economics. Were I a fool (and we shan’t ever forget that I am) I would probably say “Hmm…” and either leave the site or look down the blog.
• Subtitles for content. If there is a single flaw that almost every blog on the planet (mine included) has, it’s that you don’t have more to go on before diving in than than the few words that make up a post’s title. But even the most pithy title can strongly benefit from an intriguing subtitle, as both Slate and Salon illustrate (in randomly selected articles).
• Too much sidebar. This is harder one to judge, and a much harder one to agree on. Some think that sidebars should be stuffed or exploding, I certainly don’t. One of the strongest arguments against a sizable sidebar is made by Free Exchange: a interesting sidebar easily distracts attention from your boring-looking content. This (too wide) sidebar is distracting with its ads and pictures and colorful tag cloud. All of these things make me more likely to click around (and perhaps away) and less likely to realize how good and useful the blog’s contents are.
• Hard to get around. The Economist seems to be struggling mightily to hide their blog content from outsiders. Not only is it hard to click to the site’s other blogs when you’re in one, but it’s hard to find content within that blog. Other than the distracting tag cloud, there’s the thin-and-nearly-hidden link to their month-by-month archive and a list of recent posts. All of these are rather standards in the blogsphere, but they’re hardly good. The site’s Archives page, when you finally find it, look suspiciously like the default WordPress archive that I’ve worked to correct twice before.

Those four issues certainly aren’t an exhaustive list of the (disputable) flaws in The Economist’s blogs. The clearly-broken look of their American politics blog Democracy in America is perhaps a greater sin than any of the above bullets. But I’m glad to have noticed these sins, and hope they can be instructive in my (and perhaps your) future work.

You hear it a lot on the internet, and even off, “content is king.” “Why isn’t my blog making money?” “Because you’ve got bad content” is the pat — which is hardly to say correct — reply. This argument doesn’t make a lot of sense though. Some of the most well-known and profitable blogs are essentially lukewarm summaries of other people’s content or worse yet, warmed-over platitudes. Something else clearly matters.

Perhaps the simplest and most useful analogy for how content matters on the internet is offline publishing. Although both magazines and books have ever-increasing online presences, they still live primarily in an offline world, as any publisher can tell you. And though the analogy isn’t perfect, it demonstrates a few of the essential reasons that content isn’t king.

Publishing Offline

As any publisher can tell you, distribution is the most important component of selling a book. A great book in a well-designed jacket cannot sell if the only place you can buy it is the publisher’s warehouse. Distribution, to brick and mortar stores like your local bookseller, Barnes & Noble, or Walmart is still the best way to make sure a book is visible. Being listed on Amazon.com certainly adds to a book’s visibility as well, but when the majority of books are still purchased offline, it’s not enough to be available there.

Having a visible presence for a book in a brick-and-mortar store is the first step toward selling a book, but it’s not the only one. Once a book is visible, it needs to be looked at. If being visible is analogous to being seen, being visually interesting is the first step toward being looked at. In an offline bookstore, the number of bound pages you see is astronomically larger than the number you actually look at. Being looked at means that, at least, your eyes linger long enough to read the title and author of the book. Perhaps you’ll pick it up and thumb through it, but that’s often a step beyond being looked at.

And as any book publisher or customer are Border’s will tell you, the most important thing in getting looked at is being visually interesting. Imagine a book called Pooh and Eeyore. One version of the book merely says those words and lists the author but is otherwise blank. The second version has a colorful picture of a half-eaten Pooh coming out of Eeyore’s mouth, and the subtitle, “A chilling tale of lies, deceit, and revenge.” There’s little doubt that even if the second book’s cover is a little sensational, it’s also going to be looked at more than three times as much, and bought probably twice as often.

Once a book is seen and looked at, its contents finally matters. Once you’re looking at a book, you’ll read the book jacket and figure out if the topic really interests you, you’ll flip the pages and maybe even read a few. But it is only here that content matters. In the process of determining if a customer buys a book or not, content comes in third, hardly a kingly position.

Some Caveats

Having just told you how “content is jack” is more true, if less elegant, than “content is king,” I’m now obligated to tell you a few of the reasons that my story fails.

The first problems is that a book’s contents determine if a publisher buys a book from its author. That is, publishers — though it may sometimes seem otherwise — usually make content king in the first place. They then make sure that the distribution network, and the visual impact of the book’s jacket, matches the good content inside.

But for the self-published, both in books and blogs, there isn’t a publisher to take care of the distribution and design for you. So they are, again, very important for you in the dual role of “author” and “publisher.”

The other important caveat for the above story is that search engines are meant to negate the seeing→looking at→reading process. Google should — not to say it does — tell you the best article about any given topic, and if you’ve written the best article, you’ll be seen. So ideally, Google would assure that even for the self-published without great distribution or design they get seen.

But this fact underestimates that Google evaluates what is the best by how many links it has. And the number of links that content gets is driven, at least a little, by how easily it moves from being considered “unkown” to “great content,” the essence of our story.

What to do

So you’ve got a blog that you want people to read. You think its content is great but you’re not seeing the type of traffic you’d expect. What to do?

The best answer is that there really is no solution but that pat suggestions you’ll find all over the internet. There is no single thing that will get your blog seen, looked at, and read by the masses of people you desire. But there are many things you can do to help. I’ve listed a few of the more novel ideas below.

1. Have a unique design that highlights your content. This is crucial for moving people from “seeing” to “looking” and onto “reading.” When someone arrives — via Google, Digg, or StumbleUpon — they’re likely to leave if the content looks like “Just another WordPress weblog.” If you blog looks novel and well-designed, they’re much more likely to stick around.
2. Comment on other people’s blogs. When someone sees that you’ve read what they’ve written, they’re more likely to read what you’ve written.
3. Advertise. I say this fully aware that the average blogger loathes the idea and that the average list of “improve your blog” sites thus don’t give it. After all, this list can’t just become a grouping of what I called “warmed-over platitudes” at this article’s outset. But advertising is great way to drive traffic you’re willing to pay, and thus get more eyeball a chance to see your content.
4. Join blog networks. When you join a blog network, either explicitly or implicitly (with a blogroll) you assure that people with interests in similar content as you will see your content.
5. Highlight your best work. I’ve sort-of addressed this before, but the newest-first mentality of blogs can easily mean that your best content is missed by new visitors. It’s useful to have a list of some of your best stuff in an easy-to-find place, perhaps the sidebar or your archives page.

Follow all of that advice and… something might happen. I’m not going to make any hollow guarantees. The fact is that content matters more than my iconoclastic title allowed (even if it also matters less than the conventional wisdom allows). No new publication becomes suddenly popular. It takes time, word of mouth, and in the case of books, magazines, CDs, and movies, millions of dollars worth of advertising. It’s good not to forget that fact.