Kent Newsome has posted another article, based on Steve Rubel’s post, that got me thinking. Give it a read here, my comments below.
Kent, I totally understand your sentiment. I used to work as a web designer, I understand the personalization that the different site designs give. Unfortunately though, I can’t share all of your opinion.
I aggregate a lot of feeds. Being a journalist with MobileBurn, I need to stay connected to a lot of different sites. I really do appreciate the generic design across all the feeds I read in an aggregator. Although I do miss the individuality of a site, I believe that one can achieve a bigger sense of individuality through the writing on said site. Having to find my way around so many dissimilar designs, not to mention having to jump to so many different URLs, would hurt my productivity.
My opinion is, be an individual through your ideas and writings. You shouldn’t have to have a flashy website to be an individual.
Many thanks for the comment and link.
Content is definitely more important than form and flash, and without the content I wouldn’t be interested in the other stuff. But if I enjoy reading someone’s material, I become curious about their taste in music, books, etc. Being a Flickr fan, I like to see if they have a Flickr badge with some photos. Fred Wilson’s page is a great example, I go there for his content, but I have also found out about some good music by looking at his rotation column. It’s the deeper experience that I enjoy moreso than the flashy web design, etc.
But by the same token, there many sites where I just want the main content- because there isn’t anything else or because I am less interested in the “sidebar content.” For those Onfolio does the job perfectly.
P.S. Thanks for the heads up re my trackbacks. I didn’t realize they weren’t showing up on the item pages. I think I have it fixed now.