If your blog were a building. . .

...what kind of building would it be?

• An office, a factory, a shop?
• A house, an apartment, a farmhouse?
• A palace, a shack, a chicken coop?
• Perhaps a workshop, a crafting room, a studio?
• Or even a garden, a park, a forest?

There was a time when we thought of websites as places; places where we would spend some time, wandering about and exploring. As a proud elder blogger, I was around during that time, and my site designs reflect that.

Now we seem to think of websites more like billboards -- something we must grasp quickly as we drive by. A website must grab our attention immediately, above the fold, because we won't stay long.

As personal bloggers, or keepers of online diaries and journals, we can ignore some of this advice. We can make our online space our home space, with the comforts and entertainments we like to offer our guests (and ourselves.)

I think . . .

. . . a website is like a building, a place; and so, we do need to pay attention to the limits such a building presents. A website accessed with a new, fast computer on a broadband connection can be a big place; a website accessed with an old, slow computer on dial-up is, by necessity, a small place.

Thus, the advantage of rooms = pages. If you have this feature on your blogging platform (TypePad and Wordpress both offer this) you can offer more high-bandwith content, as it needs to be downloaded only a bit at a time.

Or, you can make a second (and a third...) blog, and link to it to give your visitors what you want to provide without stuffing your rooms so full that your guests can't squeeze into them.

My blog (Watermark) is my house; my homesite, my home. And it is like my house: small, but with several rooms; plain white walls; and cluttered with poetry, pictures, toys and critters. It's not a place you can capture in one quick visit. It requires some time, a cup of tea, a chocolate truffle, a practiced curiousity, to get the sense of it.

This blog is more like a library. A children's library, perhaps. You can dash into a library to get a specific book, and dash out again as soon as you have it; or you can spend the afternoon browsing in the stacks.

Related posts here:

Personal Blogging|Blogging for the love of it

Related posts elsewhere:

The Personal Side of Personal Blog Design

Digging in the Dirt