Charles Apple

Ernie Smith created ShortFormBlog just ten short months ago. In that time, he’s turned the experiment in web presentation into a hell of an enterprise.

A lot of folks are talking about ShortFormBlog. It’s a fun read.

Ernie is making a few design changes today. He writes:

The hope, of course, is to keep building a wider audience so it becomes something that I don’t need to break my back to lift.

He walked us through the update…

What hasn’t changed
The commitment to providing people with short, info-packed bites that provide quick insight into the day’s news. Most of the post styles are still exactly the same as they were on day one of the site.

Oh, and Julius is still the mascot. (And one of the trademarks, referring to the site in the “editorial we,” continues unabated.)

What has changed
Over the last ten months, it’s become clear what’s worked and what hasn’t, and what was needed to take that basic idea and turn it into something more useful for readers. So with that in mind, we’re making three changes…

1. Simplify, simplify: The one thing that the old site struggled with over time was that it tended to get overcomplicated by the number of links on the side of the site. Considering the nature of the content, it could get cluttered.

My solution? Keep content out of the way of stuff. Social media links on the new design have been pared down to the two sites everyone uses, Facebook and Twitter. The logo and complementary typeface have been changed to emphasize cleanliness (the old font, admittedly, grated on the eyes after ten months).

And the design has more natural places for advertising. Because we want to get paid for our hard work. :D

2.) More Twitter-friendly: The front-page experience of the original ShortFormBlog was nice, but that experience often didn’t translate to inside pages, which is where most of the readers were coming in.

So that was where most of the work went. If you click on an individual link to the site, the article is right there, along with navigation that encourages a next step. The goal is to add intrigue and encourage readers to dig deeper, whether it be the “source” article, or something else really cool on the site.

The biggest key to this is the single-page navigation, which allows for simple, slideshow-style scrolling through posts. Don’t like that post? Go to the next one. It’s a good way to “get lost” within the site’s huge amount of content. (5,130 posts so far!)

3.) Focusing the content: The site’s bread and butter is a soft approach to hard news. It’s what we do well.

To keep that focus up, we’re making some changes. Sports, the old design’s weakest link, is going away (hopefully to return someday, in a fresher, better-executed form). The strongest points – news, politics and technology – will continue to be emphasized. But the variety that makes the site work remains.

It’s not about posting too much. It’s about posting about things that can be told well, told simply, and told in ways that engage our audience. We think a tighter focus can help build that engagement.

Under the hood

Some of the things pushing the site redesign include:

• LinkWithin: To provide links to other cool things on the site.
• Disqus: To provide a consistent, solid commenting system – something harder than it looks in WordPress.
• Kernest: Which allows you to use a larger variety of fonts.
• Wibiya: A Javascript-powered toolbar which provides always-there links to search and social networking.

But more impressive than any of these has been Apture, a wonderful multimedia-based tool that allows you to link to related contextual content while still keeping readers on your site.

We’ve been using the service for about six months, and throughout have found the service to be stellar and the staff to be personal and attentive to concerns.

What’s nice about all these tools is that they’re off-the-shelf additions that help build on the basic idea of the site: To provide short bites of information, and to encourage exploration.

Many newspapers, minus the big ones, are afraid of touching tools like these because they didn’t come from in-house or in-company. As an industry – bloggers on up – we need to be looking at these closely, because they’re smart, easy-to-use ideas that allow us to further our craft. They cut though the confusion and allow us to focus on our jobs of providing information.

We need to be looking at these things as ways to draw readers in instead of sending them away. So, for that reason, we’ve been focused on trying to show how these tools can be used.

So, there you have it. Any questions?

The big E is doing quite well, too, in his day job at the Express, the Washington Post’s free youth-oriented tabloid.

A few examples of Ernie’s work from his previous gig at Link of Norfolk, Va.:

Read more here about the launch of ShortFormBlog last January.

Find ShortFormBlog itself here.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 3rd, 2009 at 5:50 am and is filed under Innovative ideas, Redesigns, Web news design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.