Smashing Magazine did a great post called A Small Design Study Of Big Blogs.
They compare the top 50 blogs’ layout and typography using about a dozen different criteria. Here’s their summary in bullet points:
- large blogs require a multi-column layout solution (usually 3 columns suffice) (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,
- CSS-layouts are used (90%),
- 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.
Wal-Mart Buyers Write Candid Product Blog
March 3, 2008
In a relatively bold move toward marketing transparency, Wal-Mart has launched a new web site called Check Out that allows their low-level product buyers to write honest (and occasionally unfavorable) reviews of the products in Wal-Mart stores. I really feel that this is a great strategy. It positions Wal-Mart as an honest source for product information online, allowing visitors to connect with Wal-Mart employees as real people instead of cogs in a giant impersonal entity.
Positive reviews of products will definitely have positive effects on in-store and online purchases, but I feel that the opposite effect isn’t as much of a risk. By giving the product buyers freedom to pan products in online reviews, Wal-Mart probably won’t see traumatic results for sales in the store where point-of-sale advertising is still going to dominate and be geared toward price conscience and impulse buyers. Now… if Wal-Mart suddenly starts posting negative reviews on pieces of paper right next to the products in the store, the strategy might not work so well, but I doubt we’ll be seeing that any time soon.
Read more in the New York Times article by Michael Barbaro titled “Wal-Mart Tastemakers Write Unfiltered Blog“.
An industry group called the International Anticounterfeiting Coalition (IIAC) is attracting a lot of negative attention for its recent sponsorship of a course at the Hunter College of the City University of New York. The IIAC fights the sale of knock-off consumer products and represents major companies in the fashion industry including Abercrombie & Fitch, Chanel, Coach, Harley-Davidson, Levi Strauss and Reebok. In the course students were told to create fictional blogs written from the perspective of college students who had traumatic experiences with knock-off products. In one example a fictitious student named Heidi Cee blogs about how her beloved Coach purse was stolen. After paying a $500 for its safe return, she releases that she has been duped with a fake and proceeds to break down into an hour long crying fit. Of course none of the student blogs mentioned that they were fake or had disclaimers about being part of a college credit course sponsored by the IIAC, so the entire situation raises huge ethics questions not only about covert guerrilla marketing practices but also the idea of corporate sponsorship of college courses in general. Read more in an article Scott Jaschik wrote for Inside Higher Ed called “This course brought to you by…” or follow in-depth analysis of the situation on Bob LeDrew’s blog FlackLife.
