"Omit needless words" is the central dictum of Strunk and White's "The elements of style". It's a good design for weblogs, where readers will make a decision about whether to skip to the next or keep going in a few seconds.
In addition to the words in each post, a blog will have an overall design. There is a temptation, and I speak from first hand experience having succumbed to it on other weblogs, to try out new widgets and see what they do. I recommend doing so, but not on the blog that you keep as an expert.
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Omit needless widgets. Your page layout should make every pixel count. In particular, think long and hard before taking on advertising from third parties or from networks like Google - at best, those ads distract from your message, and at worst they collide with it. Any active component on the page should tie directly to some core goal that you have and not just fill up space with something that generates a few pennies a year.
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Like the premise, the writing is weak - queue it out a week to see how it improves with a total rewrite.
After a week: yeah, still mostly true. I need to have some more examples of nice clean professional designs where there is not much there, some counterexamples of BLING BLING BLING which are distracting, and details about how the choice of the platform you use impact what kind of choices you have to pick from.
I totally agree with you. When I first started my blog I added every possible widget out there, excited about the opportunities (I'm exaggerating, of course, but it my blog was FULL of them). After a couple of months, I started clearing up my blog, kind of like when you clean your desktop or something. Now I have a real clean looking blog, where what's really important is in the center: my writing. Love the way your blog is organized, btw :)
Posted by: software test consultant | 11/17/2010 at 10:32 AM