Techcrunch’s previous design, which I’ve done around June 2005, resisted for almost a year and accompanied the blog in it’s tremendous growth to the 53.000 daily readers mark. Despite all its flaws (because there were a few, particularly to my eyes), it was recognized by the industry as a clear exercise on what “Web 2.0″ blog design was about. It’s not up to me to agree or disagree with that statement because I’d probably be biased, but this post clears up on what the line of thought was, on designing the previous Techcrunch (now only seen on the screenshot).

The main goal: readability

Content readability is the most important thing on a blog. Users have no time for reading, so if their first visit to a website (or blog) stresses them out, they won’t come back or subscribe - even if you have the best content out there. So in designing the previous Techcrunch, a lot of attention was given to the way people view the main content section - the posts themselves.

The basic guidelines for readability, as implemented on the previous TC, are:

• Correct line height, increasing readability of each line of text
• Constant word spacing (meaning, no justified text)
• High contrast between foreground and background (text and page background)
• Clear distinction between posts, in a non-obtrusive way
• The right font-size for the line-height (spacing proportionality)

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The last couple of days of E3 have shown us something extremely valuable - that simplicity and true innovation wins over big brands with broad goals. I’m talking about the Playstation 3 debacle compared to the Nintendo Wii - previously known as Nintendo Revolution. Even if you’re not a gamer (I used to be, now time doesn’t allow me that much playing), read on - there’s a lesson to be learned from Super Mario and friends.

Being Nintendo

Here’s a recent story. While Sony concentrated on showing gamers a whole lot of bang with full-motion videos and glances over controller prototypes for the Playstation 3, Nintendo was quietly starting a Revolution with their new console, Wii. With little fuss (or the right kind of marketing - buzz), they decided not to focus on building for the next generation graphics or the digital-media hub-platform bonanza-whatever. They decided to focus on what’s truly important with gaming: fun.

In keeping their focus on what the gamers really crave for (again, fun and playability), they built something really valuable. A new gaming console innovative in every way, starting with the controller itself, dictating a new way to play games. A new immersion in gaming. Sony, even having great titles under their belt (and f-ing amazing graphics, I’ll give you that), has let everyone down by being exactly the same albeit with the new Cell processor and a cool GPU.

While keeping the focus on what’s important, Nintendo managed to keep their console’s price way down (they say around $250, while the Playstation will be on sale from $499 up). This means a great deal: a much lower cost of conversion of new gamers. To be honest, seeing the videos for gameplay of the Wii makes me want to go and get one as soon as they launch - and ditch the plan to spend a buckload for a PS3.

So what can we learn?

Keeping focus on what’s really important for the target audience makes all the difference. Like Guy Kawasaki would say, the mantra of Making Good wins over the necessity of building for the extra features or tackling every problem in the world. In the end, simplicity wins.

This applies directly to building web applications. Are you building something? If you are, where’s your focus? Are you Nintendo, or are you Sony? Because there’s only one “Revolution” (the pun is now too obvious) will it be yours or the competitions’? Remember, focus on what’s important for your audience.

Related posts

For more on what we can learn from games and the gaming world, see the previous article about designing HUDs on games and web applications for insight and discussion on how important it is to keep information constantly in sight - and when that’s an error.

Every now and then around the blogosphere someone who’s trying to alert people to this new “era” we call Web 2.0 messes up and loses focus. Either by talking about things that are clearly lacking in innovation, or by talking things that are not “2.0″ at all.

The thing is we’ve all seen DHTML, we’ve all seen image generation with PHP, we’ve all seen a lot of stuff before the year 2000. We can’t keep calling every fancy thing that happens to be dynamic inside a browser a product of the “Web 2.0″. Mainly because it clearly isn’t one. But many do, many hype things that shouldn’t be hyped, or that clearly don’t deserve our attention right now - particularly in a time when we just don’t have any (time).

We’re losing focus on what’s important, again. The focus should be kept on user-centric applications, user-centric development and design and most importantly user-centric features. And if I’ve just repeated “user-centric” four times, that must mean something, right?

I thought we all had agreed, many months ago, that Web 2.0 was about people, not about news snippet generators or other randomly annoying flashes from the past. Innovation is key. Innovation, and the user. It still is, right?

One of the best things that can happen to a group of people working on a project for a while is to see it bloom and become something real. Since late January we’ve been working with the awesome guys over at ACS on a product we’re very proud of - Siteblimp. We’re not going to tell you a lot about it for now because it’s not the right time yet, but I’ve decided to post 3 tiny screen grabs to catch your eye, and tell you a little about the things we loved and hated during the time.

The things we loved:

Trust: how ACS trusted us with their idea and always kept an active discussion about what to do and when to do. Developing passion: we became infatuated with the ideas and world of the people the application will serve, even though we didn’t belong at first. Agility: how the tools we used enabled us to change rapidly if we made mistakes. Simplicity: it’s a simple idea, and a simple application - it will not rock your world or build a whole new internet but it’ll help a specific kind of person do what they do best.

The things we hated:

Dependency: having to depend on 3rd parties to succeed is always a bad thing - in this application, we depend on one of the internet giants and their decisions, something which bit us in the ass a few times, and probably will as well in the future. The unknown: undocumented features, unsupported instructions on what should be an extremely powerful API - did we say dependency is bad enough times?

The things we’ll definitely do more of:

Work late hours when the day is being productive. Rest, when we’re too tired to keep looking at lines of code. Document progress, because even agile development needs some sort of standing platform. Communicate, because the very few times communication was lost, we lost time as well.

Final words:

So, Siteblimp will be launching soon - we’ll be sure to tell you when it does. We’re excited to be launching products, and already have a few more lined up (including GoPlan, which you can read about on this site’s Work section), which will be a lot more open to discussion on the blog (because this project in particular is only being spoken of now, publicly, for the very first time).

By the way, you should definitely have a look at ACS’s weblog Pronet Advertising where they’ve been sharing their views on what you may call Marketing 2.0 and SEO - and pay attention to their running series on Getting Ranked that talks about finetuning your websites and web-applications to get better results on search engines.