Marcoullier.com

Bijan Sabet gave me some link love today, and in his post asks that I consider Tumbr next time. I nearly chose Tumblr over Wordpress, and my my thinking lined up like this:

WORDPRESS
Pros: Complete layout control. Loads of third party plug-ins.
Cons: Technologically complex.

TUMBLR
Pros: Simple to use. Built to aggregate lifestream from the ground up.
Cons: Unstructured data + limited layout control = ugly.

I chose Pain In The Ass over Ugly. But hey, the first time I met Om, he said he loved MyBlogLog but wouldn’t use it because it was “too fucking ugly.”

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1. Navigation and advertising takes up 70% above the fold. What. The. Heck.
2. They’ve ignored why people use the site and buried the reviews below the fold.
3. The speech bubbles make it hard to scan the reviews
4. Unnecessary page loads to slice data – rub some ajax on it

The good news is that all of this is fixable. The bad news is that it won’t be – by the time a design hits the public, there’s too much investment (emotional and fiscal) to allow for significant changes. Reminds me of the Allmusic redesign years ago – it still blows.

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