3by9

Designing With Blog Data

This coming Saturday I’ll be speaking on the design panel over at the Charlotte Wordcamp event in the building of the Charlotte Observer newspaper. It’ll be a lot of fun, and it’ll be good to talk about blog design again.

Designing a weblog is a lot of fun, and one of the reasons I love working with blogs is because of the sheer amount of information you can work with for the design.

When designing websites for clients, the big issue I’ve had to deal with is the lack of data you have to work with. Normally design mockups have lorem ipsum dolor text strewn throughout as there is no real text to work with yet, and very little information you can design. Design is about arranging information, and if you don’t have any information, then it’s an uphill task.

Blog design is the complete opposite. Here are some things you get for free when designing a blog. Numbers and data that you can work with when crafting the interface:

• Authors
• Entry dates and date formatting
• Categories an entry is posted into
• All the blog’s categories and sub-categories, and how many posts have been made to them
• How many posts in the last 30 days, the last 90 days, the last year, etc.
• Tags and tag clouds
• Related posts
• How many comments an entry has
• Recent comments
• Total number of comments, or number of comments in a date period
• Posting frequency

When designing a blog, you automatically get a ton of information to use by default. Mix up the information, blend it with other data points, design something useful and interesting. Draw some graphs, some charts, some relationship diagrams. There’s a ton you can do.

My presentation this weekend will be focused on cool data visualizations you can do with a blog. Charts, graphs, ways to organize information, layout ideas, all surrounding the concept of working with a blog’s metadata to enhance the overall design. No more lorem ipsum text when designing a blog, just work with what you’ve got.