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Why should you care what these bloggers are doing?
Simply because the top bloggers live and breathe online content publishing. They measure everything they do and tweak their sites to continually improve their reader's experience. Whatever they do is carefully thought through. When taken together these sites have a bigger readership bigger than all newspapers in the western world combined. That means you and I can learn a lot simply by observing how they have designed their websites. This research provides some very valuable insights.
These were the key findings. Go to the original article to get all the details.
10% used 65 – 74 characters e.g. www.blogoscoped.com
18% used 75 – 84 characters e.g. http://blogs.nytimes.com
34% used 85 – 94 characters e.g. www.huffingtompost.com
18% used 95 – 104 characters e.g. www.searchengineland.com
16% used over 105 characters e.g. www.wired.com
2.3 Serif versus sans-serif fonts? Which fonts are most popular?
86% use sans-serif
14% use serif
34% use Verdana e.g. www.smashingmagazine.com
24% use Lucida Grande e.g. www.crunchgear.com
18% use Arial e.g. www.googleblog.com
14% use the serif font Georgia e.g. www.scobleizer.com
6% used Trebuchet MS e.g. http://sethgodin.typepad.com/
2.4 How large is the font size of the body copy?
34% of fonts are 12 pixels e.g. www.doshdosh.com
30% of fonts are 13 pixels e.g. www.valleywag.com
14% of fonts are 14 pixels e.g. www.wired.com
12% of fonts are 11 pixels e.g. www.alistapart.com
4% of fonts are 15 pixels e.g. www.scobleizer.com
One site each used 10, 16 and 17 pixels
2.5 What typeface is used for headlines?
78% of headline typefaces are sans-serif
22% of headline typefaces are serif
The fonts used are:
30% use Arial
22% use Georgia (serif) e.g. www,gigaom.com
8% use Lucida Grande e.g. www.thinkprogress.com
8% use Helvetica e.g. www.zenhabits.com
6% use Verdana e.g. www.dailykos.com
6% use Trebuchet MS e.g. www.slashfilm.com
4% use Helvetica Neue e.g. www.problogger.com
2.6 How large is the headline font size?
24% use 20 – 22 pixels e,g. www.blogoscoped.com
22% use 23 – 25 pixels e.g. www.lifehacker.com
22% use 17 – 19 pixels e.g. www.tuaw.com
16% use 14 – 16 pixels e.g. www.yankodesigns.com
6% use 26 – 29 pixels e.g. www.engadget.com
6% greater than 32 pixels e.g. www.smashingmagazine.com
0% use 10 – 13 pixels
The most popular headline size is between 17 and 25 pixels.
Conclusion
I always advise people to use the design of their website to reflect their subject and personality. This means having some freedom in the way their site looks.
However some layouts and designs work much better than others. By studying what the most experienced content website publishers in the world do, you will greatly improve your chance of creating a website that works well. I don’t think you should use these research results stats to religiously map out your layout and typography, but I do think you should learn from them.
This is a summary of the key points:
large blogs/content websites require a multi-column layout solution (usually 3 columns is the max) (58%)
layouts are usually centered (94%),
layouts usually have a fixed width (pixel -based) (92%),
the width of the fixed layout varies between 951 and 1000px (56%),
58% of the overall site layout is used to display the main content,
CSS-layouts are used (90%),
the background is light, the body text is dark (98%),
the most usual (not necessarily most user-friendly) line length lies between 80 and 100 characters,
86% of sites use sans-serif to improve readability
Verdana, Lucida Grande, Arial and Georgia (only serif font) are used for body text (90%),
the font size of the body text varies between 12 and 14px (78%),
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