Jimmy

Smashing Magazine recently did an analysis of the 50 biggest blogs according to Technorati to see what similarities there were between their designs. This is what they found:

• large blogs usually have a multi-column layout (usually 3 columns) (58%);
• layouts are usually centered (94%),
• layouts usually have a fixed width (px-based) (92%),
• the width of the fixed layout varies between 951 and 1000px (56%),
• 58% of the overall site layout is used to display the main content,
• the background is light, the body text is dark (98%),
• the most usual (not necessarily most user-friendly) line length lies between 80 and 100 characters,
• Verdana, Lucida Grande, Arial and Georgia are used for body text (90%),
• the font size of body text varies between 12 and 14px (78%),
• Arial and Georgia are used for headlines (52%),
• headlines have the font size between 17 and 25px.

You can read the full article at http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2008...-of-big-blogs/

jono

It reminds of a blogger called Grizzly who blogs at http://makemoneyforbeginners.blogspot.com/. He ranks #1 or #2 for "how to make money" with a purposely plain and some call ugly blog.

It's interesting to note though that his RSS readership is quite low but he is attracting 9200 visits per month for "how to make money". Would love to know what his return visitors are - does the fact that his blog looks the way it does cause people to discount the content?