Common Visual Design Elements of Weblogs

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Common Visual Design Elements of Weblogs
Lois Scheidt and Elijah Wright School of Library
and Information Science Indiana University,
Bloomington
Scheidt, Lois Ann Wright, Elijah (2004). Common
Visual Design Elements of Weblogs. In Laura J.
Gurak, Smiljana Antonijevic, Laurie Johnson,
Clancy Ratliff, Jessica Reyman (Eds.), Into the
Blogosphere Rhetoric, Community, and Culture of
Weblogs (Minneapolis).
Custom table borders
Background Weblogs are currently a very popular
area for CMC, New Media, genre, and Internet
researchers. In this project, we sought to apply
content-analysis methodologies to weblogs in hope
of discovering patterns in the use of the
technical affordances of the genre by various
demographic groups.
Custom images

• Methodology
• Random sample of 154 weblogs collected September
  21, 2003
• Collected from http//blo.gs/ aggregator
• Grounded theory approach used to develop a coding
  scheme consisting of 23 elements
• Coding categories are not exclusive

• Thirty-eight (24.7) of the weblogs had custom
  table borders
• Female webloggers displayed 57.9 of the custom
  table borders
• While 39.5 were by male webloggers
• Multiple weblogger weblogs used 2.6 of the
  custom table borders

• Custom images were found in 43.5 of the weblogs
  analyzed
• Female webloggers posted 46.3 of the custom
  images
• Males utilized 47.8 of the images
• Images were posted on 4.5 of the weblogs being
  operated by multiple webloggers
• Unknown gender webloggers utilized 1.5 of the
  custom images in their weblog design

Color alteration

• Author Demographics
• Single author weblogs predominate in this corpus
  with 147
• Seven have two or more authors
• 48.3 of the single author weblogs have male
  authors
• 49.7 have female webloggers
• Of the 7 multiple author weblogs 2 have all male
  authors, 1 has all female authors, and 4 have
  both male and female authors

Colors in titles and headings

• Color alterations, changing the base color of a
  common weblog template, are present in 33.8 of
  the weblogs
• 57.7 of the color alteration was used by female
  webloggers
• 40.4 was used by male webloggers
• 1.9 was used by webloggers of unknown gender

• Colors in titles and headings, any color other
  then black or white, are present in 41.6
• Female webloggers utilized 40.6 of colored text
  headings
• Male webloggers used colors other than black and
  white in 51.6 of the weblogs
• Unknown gender webloggers and weblogs with
  multiple webloggers account for 7.8 of those
  using color in their text headings, 3.1 and 4.7
  respectively.

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Custom color text

• Custom banners were present in 22.1
• Female webloggers presented custom banners in
  41.2 of the weblogs in the sample
• Male webloggers displayed the characteristic in
  47.1 of the weblogs
• Unknown gender and multiple weblogger categories
  accounted for four custom banner weblogs (5.9
  each)

• Some conclusions from the paper
• Individual webloggers do not tend to make
  substantive structural changes to the default
  layout of their sites
• Design schemes are frequently minimally modified
  versions of templates provided by software
  selected by the end user I.e., people mostly
  accept default settings as given by their tool of
  choice.
• An overwhelming proportion of the customizations
  we observed came in the sidebar

• Custom color text was present in 40.3
• Female webloggers used significantly more color
  with 58.1 of the weblogs displaying this
  customization
• Male webloggers used only 38.7 of the custom
  color
• Multiple weblogger weblogs used 3.2 of the
  custom color text