brassblogs

If you’re a designer, I’m sure you’ve heard clients say this to you when you try to implement a content management system for them – especially one that works like WordPress (and is well-known for being a blogging platform).

“It looks too bloggy.”

Recently, on Twitter, I asked the community “What makes something ‘too bloggy’?”

I got some excellent responses. The use of blogrolls, meta data on every entry, the use of comments everywhere was what @jonimueller shared with me. @elitenick stated that the basic 2-column-layout (and the use of a calendar in the sidebar) screamed “blog” to him. “Professional,” he said was “something that doesn’t conform.” And @jeanniebeannie said the number (and presentation) of entries was a big tell, as well as how the categories were presented – if presented at all.

Presentation. Really, that’s what it boils down to. All of the above is very much usable (and in some cases, necessary) on a professional site. But how it’s presented is the fine line between a “blog” and a “professional website.”

My own site here is most certainly “bloggy” in design. Vonage*, however, is what most people would consider to be a “professional” site. The Big Noob is a site that pulls off a “professional bloggy” look, though. (In my opinion, anyway!) The use of color and typography is pulled off seamlessly here. However, even though this is another professional-looking site, I’ve always considered CSS Remix to be a “blog” site. Raymour & Flanigan is another “professional” looking site, as is Adidas and Swarovski – although those last two use quite a bit of Flash (which I’ve seen a lot in higher-end “professional” sites).

And finally, who can accuse Barack Obama’s site of not being both “bloggy” and professional?

* For the record, I am not endorsing any of these. They are just random sites I chose to illustrate my point.

The fun thing about most – if not all – those site is, they could all be done using WordPress. Yes, some of them would be quite difficult to pull off (Adidas, to name one out of those), but still completely doable. One thing that is definitely noticeable throughout the “professional” sites is their use of color and typography. They let the content do the talking for them, and use graphics to emphasize, not “take over”. Their use of categorization is subtle. And I don’t see a blogroll anywhere.

The reason I asked this question of fellow Twitter members is because I’m planning to do some experimentation with theme design. I am quite positive a lot of it will fail miserably. But I am also quite sure that a few things will come out of it, all sparkly and terrific.

When I begin doing this, I will definitely be “plugging” it, because I want to do things that are useful for the community – not just what I think would be great. So I’d love to have lots of input from my visitors, because in the end, if any of these experiments are actually worth using for anything, I fully intend to release them into the wild So I’ll hope you will participate with me!

Templating (and offering different version of them) is something I really love to do. I don’t get to do it often without having someone hire me to do so, and having to follow what they want. Don’t get me wrong – I do love doing that – and some people make requests of me that sometimes I think I can’t possibly do, but I manage to pull it off – which is cool. But sometimes, I just want to create something just for the sake of doing it – so you all might as well benefit from it. I also feel that, sometime,s people think that WordPress (as well as other systems) are for “blogging only” – and that you can really use these systems as a real professional content management system. I’m here to say of course you can! You just have to know what the limits are, and in some cases, how to circumvent them.

I feel like I’m about to walk into the deep end, though.. so please bear with me!