visible artifacts

By: Chris Malek

Feb 28 2009

Category: Articles

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I haven’t been writing much lately because I’ve been been living my busy life (which has been especially busy of late), of course, but also I’ve been working on the form of this blog.  You may have noticed the updated look of the pages. I’ve been incrementally changing the site to better achieve my goals for it and address some of its shortcomings.

I’ve given an official title to the blog: “Visible Artifacts.”  This title reflects many things about me: my desire to make hidden things visible, my love of creating things, especially visually oriented things like artwork, web site design, and visualizations.

In this latest update to the blog theme,  I’ve changed the page header to give some information about the current post, the previous post and the next post.   I’ve changed the search results page to actually return some text instead of purely images.  I’ve hopefully adjusted the readability of the text in the body of the post to make the post easier to read.   I think that the new theme is more usable than it was, but I’m still not sure how I feel about my new changes.

Design goals

For a long time now, I’ve been unhappy with several aspects of this blog: the title, the layout, the navigation and the readability.  I had originally based the theme for this blog on the Monotone photoblogging theme.  Being a photoblogging theme, it did not have good (any, really) support for long text passages, and many aspects of the site were not very usable from the from using it as a more typical text oriented blog.  For instance, the search returned only the image for the page, as did the original archives page.

My design goals for this site are these:

• I want a large interesting image associated with each post which relates to or informs the text of the post.   Mostly, I would use  my own photography and artwork for this, but I might also use public domain and Creative Commons work, also.   My personal goal for this is to, at least in this small way, reincorporate making art into my daily life.  My goals for this as they pertain to my audience are two-fold: first, to make my site look obviously different and more interesting that a typical text only blog; second, to give people two offerings to be interested in — an image and text.
• One post only, in full, on the front page.   Minimize busyness on the page: sidebars crammed with widgets, for example.   Visitors should see the content I’ve put up without having to click a “More …” link, and without having to search through a list of posts.   One post on the front page is also a consequence of me wanting a large image associated with each post.
• Stock the blog with content which relates to my life as an IS researcher, and which may be of interest of people who are interested in IS, especially current IS students.

All of these goals introduce challenges when it comes to designing the site layout.

1. The large post on the front page causes the text content to actually scroll off the bottom of the page on most monitors, such that a visitor has to scroll to even see the title of the post.   This is pretty much a web design no-no.
2. One post per page makes it difficult for a visitor to see how many posts before the latest one are new to them.   The original Monotone theme had no obvious navigation at all — the visitor had to click on the appopriate area of the image to go back through the posts.
3. Since I want the images to have the same promience as the text, I want both a thumbnail of the post image and the exceprt from the post to appear both in the archives page and in the search results page.
4. Although I don’t want the page to be busy, there are actually some kinds of information that are not either the post image or the post that I want to put on the front page:  site features, my blogroll, etc.   It’s been challenging to find space on the page that does not disrupt the main focuses of the post, but which are also promient enough such that users will find this extra information.

I’m hoping that my latest updates have addressed parts of (1), (2) and (3).    (4) is next, probably.