Seo blog, you got me laughing out loud with your comment ;-)

I’m honored to have our site listed among such great company. Thanks for the mention.

I love Lauren’s site re-design by the way.

I don’t mind Johno’s long list of articles on the sidebar only because I’m a regular reader of iLT, but I have to admit it is hard sometimes to look for a particular article on iLT. For example, I was trying to locate where did John mention how many posts he already has on iLT, and it took me awhile (the search function didn’t help me here) to find it among the other Sunday Type articles, which goes back to your point on a descriptive title, but then that’s the nature of Sunday Type posts that are jam packed with type goodies. On the other hand I really like the long list of featured fonts on iLT.

Patrick, you’re very welcome. And welcome to Inspiration Bit. Thanks for your kind remarks about iBit as well, hope to see you around here again.

Thanks, John. It does take me a long time to put these research articles together. I’m considering on taking a break and posting shorter articles for awhile, as my TODO list gets very long, similar to yours. I too find it challenging to organize a site like yours, that’s why I’ve also included AIGA and ALA in this list to get some ideas on the way they dealt with their Information Architecture. Good luck with iLT’s IA :-)

I’m really struggling to find a good way of helping readers find older articles. That list in my sidebar does not include every article, but almost. The problem is, that it’s getting longer and longer. In ten years, it will take you as long to scroll to the last article in the list. So that’s something I need to think about. I was relieved to hear what Pearson said about “categories”. The difficult thing in all of this (as you pint out) is attempting to permit easy access to everything, without cramming the page.

I like the Warspire site. I played with a similar tabs thingy for iLT, but it just looked like a train wreck. Warspire’s is very nice; I may have another go at it.

Vivien, you’ve obviously put a lot of time into this article. It’s great, and I really appreciate it. Thank you. Now I’m off to do my homework!

important to pay an extra attention to how we structure our blogs without adding a clutter to the site

So true! And in addition to the other things you noted about the evolution of blog design is that we mainly use right hand navigations instead of left hand. I think that’s quite interesting and I like it much better because the deeper nav is closer to the scroll bar. It makes perfect sense to me.

Thanks for the link to Chris’ article on categories. I have seen it before, but it wasn’t totally relevant to me at the time. Now it is. I definitely need a better way to for visitors to browse my articles.

These details give me a lot to think about. It’s not too late to slightly restructure some aspects of my blog. And I like how you brought AIGA into the mix, too, as a large site with lots of sections.

I would like to add NxE as an example of good homepage info organization, though I wish they didn’t have the whole article archive there. What I like best is that the header area has the newest article, so when you visit the site, it really looks like the author is updating the content often.

Good questions at the end. I look at either related articles or popular articles first–and I don’t believe these necessarily have to be reader popular articles, I think they can also be articles that embody what the blog is about, though maybe a more appropriate title for those would be Recommended Reading. I’m not as likely to look at those, though. I also like it when the author makes it super easy for me to Stumble or bookmark the article with the ShareThis (or similar) button.

Most frustrating? No contact info, no author info and no dated articles or comments. As an author, I originally thought it would be great to have “timeless” articles, but the nature of blogs is that they are dated and it annoys me to no end now when I can’t find a date (because inevitably you will publish an article that is time-dependent–like a contest announcement or a WP fix–and I will find it 2 years later and try to use it).

For a site that I visit regularly (like this one), I want a super easy way to find that article from three weeks ago that is relevent for the article I want to post tomorrow. I see this as two parts: a title that accurately describes what is in the article and a simple, single page chronological archive of posts (for older blogs or blogs that post 5x/day, maybe this can be divided into separate pages for years or quarters). This doesn’t have to be displayed as a list of monthly archives, just a link, maybe in the search area (liked that example from Hell Yeah Dude) or main nav to Archives. Increasingly I’m not liking categories for searching because what makes sense to be filed in Graphic Design to me, might make sense in Web Design to you.

Phew! Enough feedback for ya? ;)