BlobFisk.com

Over the Christmas break I decided it was about time that blobfisk.com needed a makeover. Most sites go through a regular redesigns. Indeed, when I start my gig as User Experience Manager at Channel 4 the biggest thing that me and my team were working on was the redesign of channel4.com itself (more on this in future posts). So, the time came for blobfisk.com to undergo a refresh.

Up until now my tiny personal site had no content management system powering it and not even the slightest whiff of a blog. For a long time I wasn’t the biggest fan of blog sites (you can read some of my misgivings in On rethinking the homepage), but I’ve changed my mind! I was not against the concept of blogging, but the aesthetics and usability of blog sites. I felt that blog driven sites tended to overwhelm users with information and lacked clear navigation, often throwing away the common website paradigms that people are used to.

I think that there is still something to be said for this. Blog driven sites, especially ones with frequent posts, need to be careful not to overwhelm

users. However, I feel that the shape and feel of blog sites has now become a common paradigm for sites, a design pattern. People comfortable on the web know how blog sites should behave and understand how to interact with them. The tools that we, as site owners, use for blogging have also come on in leaps and bounds. I use WordPress and it allows me the flexibility to modify and tweak to my hearts content. It also has a wealth of plugins and widgets that I can use to (hopefully) enrich you, the users, experience of my site.

So, now blobfisk.com is blog driven and I’m blogging. Hopefully I’ve eaten my own dogfood and made the site easy to use, the content easy to digest and posts of interest to one or two of you!

I mentioned that one of the biggest things that I’ve worked on since joining Channel4 has been the redesign of channel4.com, I’m going to be writing some posts on the methodology we used and experiences and lessons I learned – I hope they’ll be of interest to you!

Thanks to Cieleke for use of the photo in this post.

Tags: blobfisk

This entry was posted on Friday, January 9th, 2009 at 17:21 and is filed under General Musings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.