What makes for an excellent blog? First and foremost is the layout. As Hosey points out in Why We Love Beautiful Things, “instinctively, we reach out for beautiful things. Beauty literally moves us.” Shapes, backgrounds, and layouts that feel right, Hosey points out, can be explained by geometry. “Golden rectangles” are the “magical proportions” that draw us in. For example, The Family Bucket List drew me in right away. Not only is the “golden rectangle” used is this blog, but immediately the colors, layout, and photographs drew me in. The white background made the high quality photographs pop, and the font and rainbow hue to the title told me a little bit about the blog beneath it.
As for the content, I find the blog posts that draw me in are the ones written in a conversational tone. As Carroll explains, not only does a conversational tone inject you into your writing, but also it allows a reader to feel more connected with their writer, making digital media personal. Blogging is the perfect platform for this type of writing because there are no rules around structure or grammar. Personally, I like to have a conversation with what I am reading. Take a look at Nomadic Matt’s travel blog as an example of this conversational writing. As Rorabaugh states, “write loosely.” A blog post sticks out to me when I can see writers thought process.
As Morris points out, “digital writing has no roadmap.” Not only in inviting readers to interact with your content, but actually writing content that is eye-opening and unexpected makes for an excellent blog. Just take this post from The Oatmeal. Not only is the format and scroll-down feature of the comic unique, but so is the content. There truly seems to be no roadmap for this blog post, and I found it exciting. What I was expecting to be a sarcastic comic strip about happiness, actually turned into an unexpected commentary about the social pressure to be “happy.”
Those are the things that I personally think make for an excellent blog. I am sure that others have different opinions. The blogosphere is so vast and unruly, that I am not even sure there is such thing as an outline for creating at “excellent” blog.