Mark Kleiman's Blog Design

On my assigned blog, Mark Kleiman’s Reality-Based Community, the use of screen real estate is fairly good, with about 70% representing actual content of interest. If anything should be changed, the title bar should be reduced in size and the navigation sidebar condensed. Much of the website is dedicated to navigation, but it probably accounts for about 20% of the space which is reasonable according to Jakob Nielsen.

The page load time is within one second on my home internet connection, which is a fiberoptic line. The fonts load just fine, with no unknown typeface use. The webpage does not have many pictures or extras that might be difficult to load on a slower connection. It’s pretty basic and would most likely load within one second on a slower server.

As far as ALT text attributes are concerned, there is only one picture on the website. This picture is of Mark Kleiman’s most recent book. The picture and other graphic links do not appear to use ALT attributes. Nothing happens when my mouse hovers over the images. Plus the images load so fast that there is no need to use ALT in that respect.

Most of the website’s left sidebar is made up of structural navigation links. Other links include associative links to other blogs and/or outside web pages. Links to an “About Us” section and links to various ways to share the website are also posted. The most distracting links on this page are two areas where Google has advertisements. The current ad says to take “Clinton’s Global IQ Quiz,” which seems completely out of place with the rest of the site’s design. These advertisements are displayed in the same navy blue color that other links on the website are shown in. Titles that link to the permanent blog locations are this same navy blue color, but stuck inside of a light blue box for a small difference, (these titles have an ALT-like description when hovered over). The links are overall important as they navigate to pages with more information, though they don’t tell you anything about the site you’re being sent to. The Google ad links and even the link to Kleiman’s new book are a bit distracting.

Kleiman’s blog does not heed Nielsen’s warning to “just say no” to frames. It has a standard frame, with 3 main areas: title, content and navigation. All of these areas are a different color, making it very easy to see the borders. The framing is not overwhelming, but I do think some of the extra lines and even the navigation bar’s color could be changed to make it less “busy” looking.

The top item on the blog as of this posting was a piece entitled “Out of Whole Cloth.” This post criticizes blogger John Aravosis for getting his facts wrong about President Obama’s statements regarding the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy of the GLTB community when it comes to the army and other services. The blog is interesting as it backs up its claim with a link to Aravosis’ blog and a link to an AP story about the issue. This blog was more effective than some of Kleiman’s other blogs that simply list opinions without citing any concrete resources.