Blogging and good design versus good content

In the last seminar we had in the course 'information retrieval and new new media' (that I've mentioned earlier in this blog that I'm taking) we discussed what effect bad design can have on good content and how good design can affect bad content. Since I've studied usability a bit and try to incorporate that in everything I do I went to see if my good buddy Jakob Nielsen had anything to say about usability in blogs. When I say good buddy I of course don't mean that I know the man but rather that his ideas has helped me out in the usability department before.

As it turns out he has written a ten point list about usability issues in blogging too, just as he has done with web design in general and other things. If you have a blog then read his list because it pretty much cover it all in ten, easy to read and understand, points.

One point that I have thought a bit about but not so much that I have realized the full ramification of it is headlines. As Nielsen says, most RSS feeds and ping services and the like only display the heading of your post and so a new reader will decide just from reading the headline whether he or she wants to read what you have written. This is also something that my teacher, Mark Comerford, has written about on his blog.

Going back to what we discussed in the seminar I would have to say that if you follow Nielsen's 10 points then you will have cleared out the worst issues and so you will at least have a decent design, you will not have a blog that covers ten different areas (like this one do) and you should not have really bad content in your texts. However Nielsen can of course not help us write good, that is something that we have to do ourself and that leads me to the end of my thought process regarding good design versus bad content and vice versa.

Good design can help bad content but bad design will mostly turn people away from a place even before they even start looking at the actual content. Just compare with your every day life. Say you are going to buy a new car, would you rather buy a car that looks like a Skoda or a Dodge Viper? To me the answer is pretty easy, even though I can't afford a Viper. Of course good content will help to keep a loyal reader reading your blog once you have managed to capture their interest but you will never get to that point unless you first have good design.