Hipster Website Design

Design is something incredibly important when it comes to popularising a website, in particular a music blog. While many music blogs may focus on providing hip music, the successful ones will also focusing on a hip design so as to appeal to their target audience. When browsing the internet, most people will make a snap decision whether or not to spend time on a website based only on their very first glance- when people have billions of websites at their fingertips, they are only going to spend their time on one if it really catches their attention, and design is a big part of this. Just how to create ‘cool’ design is a question posed by Alan Liu, and is one that should be considered by every music blogger.

General

It is widely accepted that modern website design ‘cool’ is streamlined and minimalistic. Gimmicks such as moving GIFs and backing music are seen as indicators of older websites, while newer websites generally feature very little that detracts from the content of the website itself. Olia Lialina’s article A Vernacular Web 2 from the reader (and available online here) discusses how much of what once was seen as ‘cool’ in website design is now seen as unnecessary and unprofessional, such as glitter.

Ironically many of the seemingly simplistic modern website designs, are actually technically extremely complicated. Flash designed websites (a list of some of the best is here) for example appear as very simple and intuitive to navigate, but are actually very difficult to build and are reserved almost entirely for professional design firms rather than amateurs.

It is particularly  interesting however to look at the design of music blogs as these are mostly amateur and need to strike a fine balance between form and content.

WordPress Blogs

WordPress.com blogs are very limited in design options. CSS editing exists, however this remains the field mostly of professionals, meaning that the people capable of using this option effectively would probably have a WordPress.org blog.

For the typical WordPress.com user, the appearance of their blog will revolve around one of many preset themes. There are 92 of these themes available, which seems like a lot but really isn’t when you consider that there are over 200,000 WordPress blogs. This means that, on average, each theme will be used by over 2,000 blogs (and of course the more popular themes will be used by many more blogs than this).

Of course there are further customisation options, most notably in the form of uploading your own header and adding widgets, however there is still relatively little variance in the design of WordPress.com blogs.

My Blog

This blog uses the theme ‘ChaoticSoul’ by Bryan Veloso. It is a theme very much in line with the mainstream movement of modern web design, that of sleek minimalism. It divides my blog into two columns, one for posts and one for widgets, and features a header and blog title (which, interestingly, cannot be changed from lowercase). The background is black and grey, but titles appear in orange, which stands out significantly.

I chose this design because I feel it allows my content to stand out, while at the same time highlighting the important elements. The only problem I have encountered with the theme is that it has no ‘Pages’ bar like most themes do, however this can easily be solved by encoding a ‘Pages’ bar in a ‘Text Widget’, as I have done. For me a large and neglected part of blog website design is how posts are structured, so I opt to center my images and titles, write in small paragraphs, and give all images a border.

I have customised my blog by adding a header I edited myself. I found the original image on the internet, then edited it using a free open-source image manipulation program (GIMP). I feel the result compliments my blog quite well, whilst not standing out too much. The concept of a shining, almost mystical city relates to the title and overall topic of my blog; that of whether the internet is the fake empire, or the real world is. I have also included several widgets, such as the integration of my Twitter feed (social media integration is very important for website design), a link to my other blog, and a ‘tag cloud’.

Music Blogs

As you can see, music blogs are actually quite uniform in their design. This is simply because there is such an overwhelming need for these music blogs to be ‘cool’ that they simply cannot move away from the mainstream movement. This sleek design also compliments the function of music blogs, allowing the eyes to not be distracted as the ears are entertained.

Alan Liu makes the claim that Information Is Style, and this is certainly true of music blogs. He says that design contributes to the communication of meaning, and therefore music blogs, which simply have to be ‘cool’, must also look ‘cool’.

Retro

As with anything however, when a concept becomes mainstream, such as slick minimalist web design, there is always a counter-movement, and this counter-movement often draws on the principals of the past (a timeline of website design can be seen here). In terms of website design, this means that a retro design option exists.

The classic example of this is ‘Geocities’, which is an old website with frankly appalling design that is held up as the most exaggerated example of the ‘old internet’. There’s this really cool tool called ‘Geocities-izer’ which makes any website look like it was made in 1996 (complete with backing MIDI loop). Here are a couple of examples:

There’s a really interesting article here about how Geocities “invented the modern internet”, even if it inspired a lot of web design that would now be considered “horrible”. In fact there are a lot of similarities between Geocities and Myspace, which also gave the user the ability to mess around with gimmicks such as backing tracks and animated GIFs, and also led to a lot of horrible-looking websites designed by amateurs. Perhaps this is part of the reason WordPress allows users relatively limited options for amateur customisation.

‘Retro’ doesn’t necessarily mean ‘shit, however, and many examples of vintage website designs can be seen here. However very few music blogs utilise this retro style of design, simply because ‘cool’ is still seen as minimalistic, and it is so very very important for music blogs to look cool.

Conclusion

Ultimately, despite the trend of retro website design, there can be no arguing that minimalistic and sleek currently constitutes ‘cool’ web design, as it enables content to speak for itself and does not detract the reader’s attention away from what the site owner wants them to be looking at. This is particularly true of music blogs, which almost unanimously utilise a stylised and simple layout.

And, if this means moving away from Geocities and Myspace, it can only be a good thing.

~ by Lachy on May 15, 2010.