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August 18, 2005
Do looks count?
I’m at the Blog Business Summit in San Francisco on a borrowed laptop that hasn’t cooperated well with the free WiFi system provided by AnchorFree. I finally got connected after two hours. And one more rant: hitting the “L” on this keyboard requires a heavy hand, so please forgive me if my typing ooks ike this (ironically, that turns "blogs" into "bogs").
The second session this morning focused on blog design, with DL Byron, of Textura Design and pugblog.com, and Chris Brownrigg of Boeing.
“Does design matter? Yes, even more so now, because content is king,” Byron said.
Brownrigg is the Boeing employee who designed Randy Baseler's blog with XHTML. Because Boeing wanted the site up quickly and Brownrigg wasn't a blogger, Brownrigg didn’t use blogging software but hand-coded each page and built each archive page by hand. The calendar was a .gif that had to be manually updated and image-mapped. Boeing later brought Byron in for knowledge about blog-publishing tools and did a redesign.
Interesting fact: The site is called Randy’s Journal because Boeing was uncomfortable with the term "blog." But Brownrigg put "blog" in each page title so if people searched for Boeing blog, Google would find it.
“We took no comments at first, then added an email link – we got flamed and peopled asked ‘Why can’t you use a comment system?' ” Brownrigg said.
The site now uses Movable Type and has RSS feeds, permalinks and comments. But Brownrigg said don’t expect a dialogue within those comments. "Randy is never going to answer his comments – he’s too frickin’ busy," he said.
Technorati tags: bbs05, blogbusinesssummit
Posted by at August 18, 2005 04:18 PM
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Comments
From my perspective, design most definitely counts, especially when you are new on the scene.
SMEs like Dave Taylor and Robert Scoble already have an audience and great content - having a well designed, eye catching blog is not as important for them because their expertise has solidified them as experts in their respective fields.
Posted by: Ken Yarmosh at August 18, 2005 08:03 PM
Nice post. Just wanted to add a footnote to my comment about Randy not answering his comments. He does answer as many as he can -- usually including them in the content of a blog entry. Like here http://www.boeing.com/randy/archives/2005/08/the_bottom_line.html.
The point I tried and failed to deliver is for viewers not to expect an open commenting system -- at least not yet.
http://www.boeing.com/randy/comments.html
Thanks!
CB
Posted by: Chris Brownrigg at August 28, 2005 12:49 AM
