John sent me this interesting research paper titled Common Visual Design Elements of Weblogs. It is an in depth look on weblogs design, and the authors drew a number of interesting conclusions, particularly relevant to a system like coComment that requires – to work fully – integration in people’s websites.

Individual webloggers do not tend to make substantive structural changes to the layout of their sites. […] “significant” customization among weblog users is in fact somewhat rare. […]

A second pattern we have observed is the frequency with which design schemes used by consumers of popular weblog software are simply minimally modified versions of templates […]

An overwhelming proportion of the customizations we observed came in some sort of sidebar – an area running vertically down the web page but with less visual prominence than the main content area (where most weblog posts occur).

Link

This is very valuable information for all the web 2.0 companies out there fighting for space on user’s sites. Users are lazy (who’s not anyway) but willing to install something in their sidebar as long as it does not change the overall layout too much.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 9th, 2006 at 7:53 am and is filed under design, english. 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.