WinnipegFreePress.com

The website is nowhere near the design that I wanted to showcase here. However, their printed Front Page of the newspaper is the design I like. They have taken the bulk of the stories away from the front page and in its place replace it with graphic pictures and headlines. Here is a picture of two separate days, Saturday and Sunday. You can see how they kind of look similar, but in a way they are quite different with the blocks of text or formatting of the stuff on the page. It’s not a great picture, and it’s too large for me to scan it. This picture does NOT do justice either, because except for the top large box .. it’s always different to fit the text and stories!

I imagined what I would want out of something like this, if I were to scribble something on a napkin … and maybe add a sidebar or something .. and – well, I don’t like this but it was my first draft .. I need to give it more thought though, maybe next week!

Page-Flip.com

This is just a demo flash site but .. what’s the saying ….

Jeez Looweeeeze .. How can I get this Page Navigation into a blog format?

futureme.org

You’ve probably seen this site .. it’s almost like a service – write yourself a letter and in ten years this site will email you .. but he’s turned it into a website.

You can probably tell that I like randomness … I have random Lotto 6/49 in my footers and random surfing the HART way of my categories .. well, if you look at the public entries on this site – there is a “NEXT” “RANDOM” and “LAST” link. Sometimes, I will just go to this site and hit random and read people’s silly letters they are sending to themselves in ten years.

And – this site has gotten a book deal out of this too! Good for them. Readers make content, and you get a book deal! OF course, it’s always about the “idea” …

I like adding the randomness of the next/last link to the scrolling – whether its for comments or for the posts at the top or bottom of the page.

blog.wfmu.org/freeeform/

This site is just an honorable mention that was in my bookmarks … It just goes to show that despite having a black background, if the colors aren’t too annoying .. and the content worth reading .. it really doesn’t have to have a white background with black text

kuro5hin.org

This site has a nice layout, monetization-wise … but that’s not why I like this design … it is for another reason – the comments.

If you scroll down to the bottom of each entry and read the comments, the reader has an option to stylize the way the comments are shown .. such as a normal comments you might see in other blogs (flat mode) or threaded mode that you might see in a forum .. or some combination in between.

And, there seems to be a lot of comments on every post!

People are commenting. Does having the choice to make them look and feel they way these commenters are comfortable the reason why? Is this a blog? Is this a forum? It’s like something inbetween.

TheTwilightSingers.com/

StrayLightRun.com

Both of these sites have something intriguing to me … as the backgrounds are alive. Do I have to explain that? What do you think of it? I like the subtlety of something like this.

theinquirer.net

This one is different, that’s for sure. But is it? On most of my sites .. I am using the “Evermore” wordpress plugin. Basically, I use this because I am sick and tired of people ‘baiting’ me to read “The Rest Of The Story” and click my mouse again. With the evermore, what it does is convert every post automatically to pause at a standard interval of text (I use 2 paragraphs or 250 words) . This way, on my front page all the reader has to do is scan down the page and read excerpts or part of the beginning of the articles and then can decide if they want to read more.

I know that my mosts are never the same length. Sometimes I have short posts, some are long, some are picture overload, some have videos .. My father has a seeing problem and it’s hard for some to be able to grab the side scroll bar, if your pages scrolls down to infinity – because basically that scroll bar slider gets smaller and smaller.

By the way .. although the mono-color red might seem too .. celebrity-type-ish’us .. if you were to have nicer color blending and maybe a small square logo in the top left corner .. well .. maybe even John at SyntagmaMedia might even consider this type of format for his magazine.

Let’s face it – isn’t it nice to just see all of the titles in one screen view and pick your magazine article to read? “jump to page 13!” .. I can see myself using this design.

thecoolhunter.net/design

Actually, I like looking at all sections of this website .. but design wise – I like the actual “Design” page format! Well, actually (again) it’s the same in the other sections of this website .. their lifestyle, art, music, travel, and practically everything else except the front page and the news!

I think this is the best site out there that I have seen in my travels – with a 1-column blog design. What’s nice that it is full of pictures, for the entire width of the column. If the picture isn’t big enough – two pictures are there .. or 3 pictures .. or 4 pictures .. or 6 pictures … and they are all in a block format with some CSS to round the corners .. I think .. and // well it’s smooth. The height is always uniform if there are more than one picture side by side, and the entire width is utilized – no align=left or hspace=15 needed!

And, talk about using those [HR/] bars .. which I’m a fan – with that fat divider line! I like.

When I surf this site .. this is one site I can truly say that I use my middle mouse wheel to scroll. I think I can safely say that I’m more of a keyboard PAGE-DOWN for simple scrolling or with the side scroll bars drag-and-move. It’s a nice change once in a while.

TailRank.com

When I see this site, I wonder if it’s possible to convert something like this in an automated “sweet-HART” post. The site almost looks like 5 columns sometimes, but it’s 3 columns.

In February 2006 I participated as a co-contributor/writer for the Light The Torch blog watching the Olympics (mostly for the curling schedule). At that time, Aaron Brazell came up with a unique way to associate each co-contributor/writer with a basic flag of their host country directly in the post. I liked that idea.

In this Tail Rank blog, all the little referenced blogs have icon pictures of the blog itself. I think that is neat someway. When I have been posting information that relates to any member site ..I include a category with the post, so you can see all of the posts (for instance) of all talked about “The-Singers.com“. Seeing a visual icon on each post would be nice.

A lot of the writers and bloggers I know and read on a daily basis also have these little ‘series’ of blog posts .. and often create their own graphic and place it in the sidebar. If I had a little graphic of every site inside the post .. it would make this site more visual .. than just having text all of the time.

I dunno .. that is what I was thinking anyway .. I’ve seen other better examples – but, can’t think of the name or URL except this one.

seobook.com

This is what I have been getting at .. making the top navigation more like a book .. and each page is either another site or chapter in it (except for maybe the affiliates menu) .. and only one of them is the site’s blog! This is a website .. Not a Blog site.

I’ve had a few clients come up to me and ask me personally if they should be blogging for their business .. because they’ve read somewhere by ‘marketers’ they should. My own view is that unless the president and owner is blogging about his vision and the company .. I would NOT recommend it. That’s related to the clients and industries that I’m currently involved with. You don’t want your staff to become addicted to blogging!

However .. blogging software is the future and the now – and there are many ways to have blogs as your website and still have a great website and promote a company’s product or services. If businesses look at blogging software for what it is – content management software – and realize the benefits – they do not need a webmaster anymore .. it can help.

But, I’ve been a fan of this site’s design for a while – it’s clean, I like the colors, easy to navigate. But I like the fact that this is a website – of a bunch of websites and sections .. not a bunch of posts in a blog. It’s something that to keep in mind, like I was saying yesterday when I posted the sugar site menu idea that I like.