As I mentioned in my last post, my company is planning to upgrade to Movable Type 4.0.  Although at first I thought of it as an impossible and daunting task, now I can see now what a great opportunity for improvement it will be -- not only because it's usually a good idea to keep up with the latest version of all software, but also in the opportunity we will have in re-thinking the design.

What we have right now is what a lot of blogs out there have...a basic, (usually) functional interface with some color thrown in.  Most are table based and very bland.  The graphics leave much to be desired, and they just don't scream out professionalism.  Some are reasonably popular in their demographic area, but few are stars, by any stretch of the imagination.

Whereas designing a news site has a special difficulty in that you have to design for as much up-to-date content as possible, the news blog shouldn't have a problem with design.  It should look professional, but I'm a big believer in the blog staying conversational and therefore not looking like a news site.

Some of the news blogs I think are well designed are those over at MSNBC, like Test Pattern and First Read.  They fit in well with the MSNBC.com website, but are different enough to not look like just another page on the site.  They are informal enough to still appear as well as read as conversational, and yet professional enough to look reliable. 

The New York Times' blogs, on the other hand, are built in the same template style as their stories, so that they seem like just another article.   The writing has a more conversational tone, but the visual, physical tone is the same as the rest of the site.   ABC news blogs, such as  Political Punch, are number one hard to find, and number two in the same category as the blogs of the Times.  They are placed in story level templates and made only slightly less cluttered.   The same can be said about CBS and Reuters blogs.

In fact, MSNBC is really the only major news outlet to design their blogs to have a different, more conversational tone than their main news site.  While consistency has its place, and I do believe there should be some semblance between the blogs and the main site, the fact is that blogs aren't just opinion pieces.  They are places where people go online for a conversation.


Reading a blog is kind of like going to happy hour with the guys from work -- you can discuss work, but it's in a much more relaxed and personal tone.


So, I am looking forward to the challenge and opportunity to gain enough consistency in the blog design where it looks like it belongs to the same news outlet, but where it doesn't feel like reading just another story on the site.  It is a design like that that will make a news blog stand out and be more approachable and therefore more readable.

Now, if I can just find the time to figure out the new archive system...