WordPress’s popularity is exploding, and with it a cottage industry of premium themes. The most fashionable feature magazine layouts, jQuery sliders and corporate-style designs. Amateur designers and weekend warrior types are mimicking these things on their own sites.
What ever happened to a plain old blog layout? In most cases it’s the most appropriate choice. When a blog I’ve enjoyed for months or years adopts one of these themes for no good reason, I’m disappointed. It’s like being at a concert where the band has gotten “artsy” with weird arrangements of all their songs. I want to say, “Your songs are awesome as written. You’re just ruining the experience.”
Thankfully I don’t have to see most of those designs because I access my blogs through RSS. But I have been completely confounded sometimes when I go back to look for an old article and I land on the magazine format.
My question is what happened to categories? Many blogs don’t even list them anymore!
More pixels means better content, right? “Oh people will love these images more if they dissolve.” That idea.
@Laanba, I think tags are synonymous with categories when done right, and even better.
The category idea comes out of “sectioning” print content. Arts & Leisure, Business, Features, Letters to the Editor. You’ll see those as section headers throughout newspapers and magazines. Sections are useful when you need to thumb through paper pages to find content, but a list of meta-content (tags) is quickly clickable.
Your categories are my sections are her genres and we all see our content differently. I had a bad experience with a client who wanted to precisely define their categories for a lot of video content, because that’s what they’re used to and since they were somewhat affiliated to academia, well, academics want to spend their time categorizing everything.
On the web or off, sections are a little vague, and there’s so much crossover of content, especially with news. We don’t just want to read a movie review (A&L), we want to know its box office gross (sorta Businessy), and what people have to say about it (maybe in a letter to the editor).
On the web, just tag what the content contains. I want to see content about “hot dogs” regardless of how it appears; it can be a rant, an image, a video, a link. Just give me more hot dogs, please.