Much like Apple’s success has shaped the design and business of smartphones, tablets, computers and software for the past dozen years, the success of John Gruber’s Daring Fireball over that same timeframe has shaped blog design, writing and business.
From the sentence, blockquote, sentence posts structure (that, to be fair, Jason Kottke has been using forever, but I’d say Gruber perfected it).
To the two-column layout with vertical navigation.
To the single Deck ad (which, also to be fair, is required to be a Deck publisher).
And even the weekly RSS feed sponsor.
I think there are probably several things going on here.
One, most of these blogs cover a lot of the same topics: Apple, design, the web, etc. Those topics seem to lend themselves well to this format.
Two, I think this is the natural evolution of blog design and content. These blogs — compared to almost all of the bigger blogs — are a pleasure to read both in their design and the number of posts they write per day.
And, three, this is a format that works for both advertisers and readers. Lots of white-space and short posts — with the occasional longer article sprinkled in — coupled with a single, highly relevant, non-animated ad and a full, free, sponsored RSS feed.
Gruber’s found a winning formula and I hope this trend of following his lead continues. A Fireballed web would be a pleasure to read.
I love the recent shift that’s taken place over the last several years — thanks to the popularity of mobile devices — towards more human websites.
At first, I was surprised how much easier it was to make a design personal once you took it out from behind a desk and monitor.
But, just like it’s easier to hand someone an iPad than an iMac, it’s easier to give a design a human touch when you’re showing actual people using a device in a casual way.
And even though the cold, impersonal look of devices standing against a white backdrop is still often used in Apple’s marketing, several of their pages and all of their iPhone 4S commercials show real people using apps.
Computers are for people, and as they continue getting friendlier and more human, it only makes sense that the web does, too.
“I like using Mocksup, but I don’t want to pay a monthly fee. Can I pay per project instead?”
It’s a good question. Who wants another monthly expense?
This is compounded with an app like Mocksup, where you maybe signed up because you’re working on a big new project, but once the project’s over you might not need to keep using it.
So, could an app like Mocksup offer a plan where you pay $5 per project? No.
The reason is straight-forward: If someone payed $5 per project for several projects at once, they could go on using Mocksup indefinitely without ever needing to pay for anything again. Once they were done with one of their projects, they could delete all of the data inside it, rename it and use it again for the next project.
Now, for webapps that aren’t project-based, one-time charges can make sense. Campaign Monitor has a plan that charges per-email-sent and Hellofax charges per-fax-sent. And for downloaded software that has minimal monthly expenses, paying up front makes sense. Echofon, 1Password and Reeder are just a few of the thousands of obvious examples.
But for most hosted web apps — especially ones like Mocksup that are project-based — it just doesn’t make sense and never will.
Mocksup is a tool for designers, is partly owned by a designer (that’s me!) and, as such, has gone through several redesigns and realigns.
To celebrate the latest redesign — which happened just the other week — I thought I’d take a look back at every Mocksup homepage from the last couple of years.
Rails Rumble edition (August 2009)
With just 48 hours to build an entire web app, I only had a few hours to spend on this guy. For obvious reasons the logo and headline didn’t last long, but I still chuckle at the devil’s “Down here we use Microsoft Paint!”
“Metaphors anyone?” edition (Early 2010)
Sigh. I really ran with the whole “Mocksup takes the pain out of dealing with mockups” metaphor. I mean, really, really ran with it.
“Hello world” edition (June 2010)
This design coincided with both a big behind-the-scenes update as well as our first paid plans, and got us our first big waveof press and signups. Unfortunately, it also confused several people into thinking Mocksup could both build and share mockups, so there was still some simplification that needed to be done with the message.
Chalkboard edition (Early 2011)
With this design I was able to clear up some of the confusion from the last design by simplifying the benefits of using Mocksup into an illustrated 3-step process. It helped a lot with conversions and was often the image blogs would use in their posts when linking to us.
Bits edition (Mid 2011)
Here not much changed other than the background and some of the bottom illustrations. If you look in the navigation you’ll notice several new marketing pages. After adding those pages I quickly learned — for maintainability and your own sanity — side-projects need as few marketing pages as you can get away with. So, with the next design, I just included “Features” and “Customers” on the homepage.
Mobile edition (current)
With the current design I wanted to bring in more color, highlight Mocksup’s mobile capabilities, show who uses it and what they have to say about it, and get across the app’s major features in as few words as possible, meaning succinct descriptions and illustrations. I was happy that I was able to do all that, plus make it grid-based and responsive.
Working on Mocksup’s marketing pages has taught me so much about fine-tuning your app’s benefits as succinctly as possible and then some. The tricky part is you probably won’t get it right the first time. Or the second time. Or the third. But through user feedback, your own experimentation and just plain patience and sticktoitiveness, you’ll eventually end up with something that works and you can be proud of.
