Unfortunately, the goal of this blog is to educate people, but not to entertain. I might get some design from Chris Pearson some day, but until then, the site will look as it is.
I can't think of many graphical elements to support the site subject, too. I could enable images for Digg/Reddit/Del.icio.us buttons under posts, of course (since the Digg-effect has passed).
Your point about 15-20 seconds sort of proves my point, too. Let's take a basic site home page for example. If you have all graphics there (or text in graphics), there isn't much information to consume and visitors will need to click through to learn more. Instead, they could have learned the most important stuff from a quick text description. Read more about building a home page here.
If a small business sells something that needs to be shown, there's no argument that they need to use images.
Likewise, it is very hard to convert a visitor to a reader if the graphics are totally irrelevant (pictures of smiling images, for example, which are abundant).
Since you didn't read to the end, it means you may not be interested in the topic. Then again, this very article is indeed quite long. As I said earlier, I don't think there can be any meaningful graphics for this site (unless it is spiders or something).
If you read the last link, you'll see that every site needs a balance. And while this site's balance is currently what you see, most business websites will need something more visually appealing (a themed logo/design, photos, at least)
Hi, Nate.Unfortunately, the
Hi, Nate.
Unfortunately, the goal of this blog is to educate people, but not to entertain. I might get some design from Chris Pearson some day, but until then, the site will look as it is.
I can't think of many graphical elements to support the site subject, too. I could enable images for Digg/Reddit/Del.icio.us buttons under posts, of course (since the Digg-effect has passed).
Your point about 15-20 seconds sort of proves my point, too. Let's take a basic site home page for example. If you have all graphics there (or text in graphics), there isn't much information to consume and visitors will need to click through to learn more. Instead, they could have learned the most important stuff from a quick text description. Read more about building a home page here.
If a small business sells something that needs to be shown, there's no argument that they need to use images.
Likewise, it is very hard to convert a visitor to a reader if the graphics are totally irrelevant (pictures of smiling images, for example, which are abundant).
Since you didn't read to the end, it means you may not be interested in the topic. Then again, this very article is indeed quite long. As I said earlier, I don't think there can be any meaningful graphics for this site (unless it is spiders or something).
If you read the last link, you'll see that every site needs a balance. And while this site's balance is currently what you see, most business websites will need something more visually appealing (a themed logo/design, photos, at least)
Btw, here's the proof that people like to read online. In short, it says that my blog is read and an average time on site was 5 minutes.