Why is my blog so messed up? The simple answer is… I’m obsessed with the idea behind the redesign of Gawker’s sites and I’m working to see if I can do something useful with it.
Gawker’s popular blogs, such as Gizmodo and Lifehacker, recently underwent a major redesign in an attempt to modernize their layout. Apparently, they were concerned that their inability to feature content in an orderly fashion was causing difficulty in accessing popular content and possible loss of advertising revenue. Instead of solving the problem the same way every other blogger in the word has, via magazine style layouts, they decided to go with something revolutionary.
So far as I can tell, it was a bad idea for them to do it. Their devoted readership hates the new design, it doesn’t seem necessary to solve the issues that were facing, I find it extremely difficult to use, I haven’t been able to find the search feature since day one, and it seems a bit buggy. An established blog should have moved with a lot more care and they may very well come to regret their decision. However, I think the overall idea has significant merit. In order to explore the concept, I decided to build a WordPress theme that used many of the same ideas. Scattertech’s designer, Sahas Katta, beat me to it. When his work was featured on Gizmodo, I decided to use it as a starting point. The mess on my blog is courtesy of the Qawker theme he created.
I say mess with the kindest regards, because he seems to have done very good work. It was obviously a rush job and lacks some of the things that Gawker made theirs for in the first place, like an easy way to pin features, but I’m ecstatic to be using it. There’s a lot of work to be done before I recognize my vision, starting with a bit of CSS styling for widgets below the articles and quickly moving to switch the sidebar to the lefthand side of the page. I’ll also be working to add more indication of place with the site, converting it to use more HTML5 syntax, and doing a good bit of restyling.
It might be that the design really is pointless and my site will always be a mess, but for now I prefer to think of it as a laboratory searching for a new way to display information.
