Best and Worst of Blog Design
Forrester, a technology research firm, recently evaluated the customer experience of 16 blogs. Not one blog passed their usability tests.
The blogs were drawn from the following categories:
Executive blogs
Justin Rattner, CTO Intel
Jonathan Schwartz, CEO Sun Microsystems
Jeff Jaffe, CTO Novell
Alan Meckler, CEO Jupitermedia
Journalist blogs
Pop Candy, USA Today
The Public Editor’s Journal, The New York Times
Postcards From Paris, Los Angeles Times
The Fix, Washington Post
Product blogs
Direct2Dell
Google Blog
Nuts About Southwest
The Lobby (Starwood Hotels)
Professional Blogs
Engadget
Boing Boing
Gizmodo
Daily Kos
Forrester assessed the blogs against four major attributes: value, navigation, presentation and trust.
I will have to assess my own blog against their criteria. Time for a design refresh.
Can’t disagree at all with the Journalists blog nomination – “Postcards from Paris – L.A. Times”. My customer experience was not that good when I clicked on that link; this is what I got:
OracleJSP: java.io.FileNotFoundException:
Set the init-param debug_mode to “true” to see the complete exception message.
java.io.IOException: The Writer is closed at com.evermind[Oracle Application Server Containers for J2EE 10g (9.0.4.0.0)].server.http.EvermindJSPWriter.write(EvermindJSPWriter.java:525) at com.evermind[Oracle Application Server Containers for J2EE 10g (9.0.4.0.0)].server.http.EvermindJSPWriter.write(EvermindJSPWriter.java:456) at _templates._index._sectionfront_2d_blog._jspService(_sectionfront_2d_blog.java:122) [SRC:/templates/index/sectionfront-blog.jsp] at com.orionserver[Oracle Application Server Containers for J2EE 10g (9.0.4.0.0)].http.OrionHttpJspPage.service(OrionHttpJspPage.java:56) at oracle.jsp.runtimev2.JspPageTable.service(JspPageTable.java:347) at oracle.jsp.runtimev2.JspServlet.internalService(JspServlet.java:509) at oracle.jsp.runtimev2.JspServlet.service(JspServlet.java:413) at javax.servlet.http.HttpServlet.service(HttpServlet.java:853) at com.evermind[Oracle Application Server Containers for J2EE 10g (9.0.4.0.0)].server.http.ServletRequestDispatcher.invoke(ServletRequestDispatcher.java:765) at com.evermind[Oracle Application Server Containers for J2EE 10g (9.0.4.0.0)].server.http.ServletRequestDispatcher.include(ServletRequestDispatcher.java:121) at trb.tii.turbine.control.web.TurbineRequestDispatcher.dispatchRequest(TurbineRequestDispatcher.java:106) at trb.tii.turbine.control.web.TurbineRequestDispatcher.include(TurbineRequestDispatcher.java:63) at trb.tii.turbine.content.web.view.Sect
(etc., etc., etc., just copied a bit of the page)