1. Sign up for a WordPress.com account
2. Choose a simple theme
3. Write you a custom front page
4. Add about and contact pages
5. Set you up on Twitter
6. Add your Twitter updates to the side
7. Set you up on MailChimp
8. Add a Mailchimp signup link to the sidebar

And you’re done. Cost? Approximately 5 hours of my time. Result? You have a better web presence than 95% of small businesses.

1. sell usability testing to a non-technical audience?
2. come up with a simple, v cheap usability process?
3. what usability testing do I do? Don’t need iA as these are 2-5 page sites. Personas and user tasks, perhaps?

1. against one page websites
2. how using plain text links is more effective as fancy links are *advert-like *in some sense intimidating *ornamentation

Allsortz Group: website screenshot

Features

This is an example of a site that was developed quickly and at low cost. I used:

• free services (Twitter, Google Calendar and Picasa) to provide a news update, calendar and gallery
• badges and Flash widgets to embed content from these services
• simple PHP used to code pages
• modular layout used for CSS to provide flexibility (e.g, main column is sometimes half, sometimes three quarters of the content area)

The other advabtage to using external services is that the client doesn’t have to struggle with something like WordPress. Twitter as a CMS is a brilliant idea.

Solution: IE has a bug where it doesn’t obey specificity properly. However, setting .nav ul li to float: left will solve the problem.

Individual widget sidebars for these types of pages

• index
• single
• archives (date, tag, category)
• separate archive page
• about

Simple grid

Just 3 cols, probably 960px but maybe 760 as this would make the content measure around 480px, perfect for 16px georgia

Typography

Georgia or helvetica? Mix? Will use lots of rules: visual style of Guardian print. 16/20 georgia good for matching with smaller leadings, but enough to read (esp. if 960 canvas).

Nielsen

Using the home page articles on useit as a guideline. Specific requirements include:

• current location highlighted in navbar
• breadcrumbs for sub pages

Structure and taxonomy

This is a log blog, rather than a mag blog. Will use tags but not categories, lots of posts on front page. Separate archive page? (Yes).

And that should do it. 10-15 hours work as widgetised and already started.

Which does read well but is devilishly difficult to enjoy writing.

As discussed before, your taxonomy will differ according to the the type of blog you’re writing (crudely speaking it’s cats for mags and tags for logs. Incidentally, perhaps it might be interesting if blogs allowed reader tagging).

Structure and appearance would also differ. More archival links and stories per page on the log, a front cover (with big image) and one/two articles with mags.

Magazines perhaps allow for more visual creativity, but a log requires some tighter, structural creativeness.

My blog is a magazine while this is a log. Jason Santa Maria publishes a magazine while Daring Fireball is a log.

The differences extend to vocabulary and grammar: blogs are possibly more disjointed, the language more tabloid, looser and informal.

Prefering logs at the mo, to be honest.