The Building Green TV website has been up and running long enough now that I’ve had a chance to reflect on what I like about it. It’s rare for a startup project to include an editorial person in the design process. New media can have a bit of a blind spot when it comes to content, and editors are usually seen as end users who will fill in data fields in content management systems built by designers and developers. There is very little understanding of content architecture, and it generally occurs to no one that editorial content even can be designed.
On the Building Green project, however, I joined the team early on as a blog consultant, and when the opportunity for top-down site redesign came up, I was on hand to be part of the core team. So we designed the site around the content, for a change.
For starters, our homepage looks just like a blog. I was fairly adamant about having actual content on the homepage, rather than a maze of headlines and menus, and I think it gives readers an immediate in. I’ve worked on projects where clients worried a lot about the site looking like “just a blog”, which I find amusing since blogs are perhaps the single greatest content advance in web architecture that triggered the content explosion (even social networks are derivatives of blogs in many respects). I think one of the reasons blogs are so powerful is that they make content accessible. Apartment Therapy, Treehugger and Inhabitat are all hugely popular sites with enviable traffic, and they are blogs, pure and simple. Concurrently, had also noticed that I had lost some interest in following WorldChanging, a site that switched formats away from the blog, and now has a homepage that looks like a headline farm, with too much going on and no obvious point of entry–every time I visited, I’d sigh at the vast offerings, and say “I’ll come back to this later”. Put off by the format, I stopped actually reading anything. All this said to me that having a homepage that read like a blog was the way to go.
We also spent a lot of time looking at social network sites, as we wanted to include reader content in the mix. One thing I noticed about the networks I liked was how insider-y they often felt, and how big the learning curve was if you wanted to really get value out of them. My favorite in our home design category is Curbly, which is beautifully put together. Still, when I visit the site after a long absence I feel like I can’t catch up–the user-generated content looks great up front, but after it falls off of the main pages, it is hard to find. So for Building Green, we chose to give our reader content its own page called “share” under the primary navigation, but also to include the best of that content in what we see as our core content: a set of “workshops”, areas of evergreen content organized by topic, e.g., architecture, flooring, framing, interiors. Items from share are hand selected for these workshops–hoping the curatorial approach ensures a level of quality and relevance that sometimes does in user content based sites. We’ve also taken to featuring a weekly “best of” round up on our homepage. The “best of” archive is one way for readers to catch up on the site’s content, and it’s also a way for us to give kudos to our contributors.
In all, I think we managed to build a site that encourages social networking and reader content, but that also keeps an editorial focus by building in ways for the site editors to curate the content as it transitions from “fresh” to evergreen. And by being unafraid of having our homepage look like “just a blog”, we’ve kept the site friendly and accessible. There are bumps and glitches and things we’d do differently, of course, but in all, I think the site reads like a dream while packing a lot of content into a simple structure.