Yglesias - Page Design

Matthew Yglesias’ blog utilizes his Web site “real estate” at about 50 percent. The top 20 percent of the page is dedicated to a [pretty cool] sepia-tinted background picture of an aerial view, with his name “YGLESIAS” superimposed in large, white font. The contrast of dark and light, and the use of large font definitely draws the viewer’s attention. I’m not sure, however, if that is the right idea when a visitor stubbles upon a Web site. The first thing the visitor should see is the content they are looking for – why they got to that particular site in the first place. Continuing on, 30 percent of the right side of the page is devoted to advertisements – which appear in large pictures and video – and links to affiliate sites. This leaves about 50 percent of the page for actual content – in this case, blogs.

When you scroll down, the advertisements continue on the right side for a few “scrolls,” and then what is left in place is simply white space. Now to the eye, the content portion of the page is at about 70 percent. It looks very organized – something readers generally like when staring into a computer screen – simple and clean.

The background of the entire page is a dark brown, while each individual blog is its own white window with black, 14 point font text. The headline of each blog is in a larger, bold font. In all of Yglesias’ blogs, he uses several links, enabling the viewer to go to another site for more information on that particular topic. This is also very helpful as a viewer – to have that connection to where the blogger got his/her information from, and to reference what they are blogging about. The links are differentiated by being underlined displaying a grey background “highlighting” the link when the cursor hovers over the text.

The loading time is relatively fast, at about two seconds. Sometimes, it seems to get a bit “stuck” and then quickly load completely. The page is definitely not cluttered, so it makes sense that it has a pretty quick load time.

Yglesias tends to blog several times a day. His most recent blog, Quiggin on Tett, is a quick analysis of a review written by John Quiggin, about Gilliam Tett’s Fool’s Gold – “an account of the development of the derivatives industry centered on credit default swaps (CDS) and collateralised deposit obligation (CDOs) that collapsed so spectacularly last year.” Again, Yglesias does not create his own story through traditional journalism; rather he analyzes the world around him. He does produce his own ideas about the topics, but the actual article (blog) itself, is not original.