June 2nd, 2006
Minimalism in Blog Themes: The Benefits
Minimalistic themes were once known as the “poor” man’s solution to efficient blog design. Either that or you would have to be a plain text-obsessed maniac to implement a minimalistic theme. At that time, an efficient blog design was expected to not only be excellent in the accessibility context, but also be peppered with image rollovers, beautiful header images, and the like.
Oh yes. I haven’t even explained what in the world minimalistic themes are, have I? Well, an example of a minimalistic theme can be seen on this blog. It’s actually a modified version of the Zen Minimalist theme, which as you can see, epitomizes imageless, colourless, and basically plain design. In fact, a three-column design like mine could actually be a little too cluttered to be considered minimalistic.
So, what’s good about a theme like this? For one, there’s less distraction available from your content (the same reason I gave for above-bottom-fold themes yesterday). Striking themes, while perfect targets for praise and mentions from web design galleries like Stylegala and CSS Beauty, tend to push more focus to how great your blog looks, rather than how great your writing is – especially for newer users who have yet to grow accustomed to your blog design.
Secondly, minimalistic themes are fast-loading. The lack of images and fancy effects lend to small overall page sizes, leading easily to sub-50KB pages which load in a jiffy in comparison to the 200+KB pages on most other blogs these days. Besides being modem friendly, you tend to get more time to impress the wandering visitor. As it has been widely reported, new visitors to any web page have very, very short attention spans. The less time they have to wait for a page to load, the more time they’re willing to give to the page’s content.
Let’s also not forget that in a generally minimalistic environment, anything that you want to stand out, really stands out. If you need a particular ad or series of posts to look extremely conspicuous, just sprinkle it with a bit of colour or add a big icon.
Of course, everything I’ve said could very well work both ways. That’s why most blogs you see, especially those catered for a highly fickle audience (tech blogs like Engadget and Gizmodo, for example) tend to bring in some minimalism in their blog designs but stay far away from embracing complete minimalism. But we’ll talk about the downsides of a minimalistic design tomorrow.
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7 Comments
June 3rd, 2006 at 8:03 pm
Personally, minimalism goes a bit too far. Especially in this broadband era, 100KB+ index pages are rather accessible, especially for tech-savvy audiences.
June 3rd, 2006 at 10:18 pm
[...] Yesterday, we talked about what minimalistic blog themes are, and how beneficial they can be. Today, we’ll look at their downsides – obvious as they may be to most bloggers. [...]
August 4th, 2006 at 1:03 am
[...] I also chose to go with a relatively minimalistic 3-column layout (not many images, so theme size is only around 40kb or so, even with the Javascript), rather than go for the above-bottom-fold style I had wanted to try earlier. This way, more can be conveyed, and monetization becomes slightly easier as more space becomes available for Text Link Ads, AdBrite, and various other affiliate products (aff links). [...]
December 15th, 2006 at 10:05 pm
The productivity benefits of doubling your desktop are well documented by now.
March 13th, 2008 at 8:03 pm
Well, that was helpful. Thanks.
June 30th, 2008 at 10:05 pm
I would like to say you all some this. This type of blogs is very informative but some guys miss use it just like thay divert the topic and I don’t like this .
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