Better Blog Design

It’s been over two decades since Wordpress first launched. As it grew to power a majority of the internet, it set certain patterns of usage and design that have remain mostly unchanged in the years since.

The chronological weblog won, and every site twists to fit it’s structure, with information architecture and reader experience suffering for it. Things don’t have to be this way.

As a push in the right direction, here are my demands suggestions:

Don’t paginate

Moving information out of view creates more interface anxiety than it’s worth. Unless you have a few hundred posts, there’s no reason to not list them all in one page. (And even if you do, a long list works fine anyway). It allows the brower’s CMD + F search to work as a full-site search.

One of my favouirte examples of laying out a small collection of essays:

Having your page be a long list of post titles and descriptions has the useful effect of forcing you to pick good titles, for your reader’s sake. Make it easier for them to decide which links to click on.

Prefer one level of navigation

Navigation levels mean something. One level means “you can see everything by opening these 5 links”, and two levels means “you might need to visit 5 * N links to see everything” where N is an unknown number – asking the user to do much more work to truly browse a whole site. Don’t do that, choose to have a single /blog list page instead of multiple /blog/year pages.

The only thing worse than two or more levels of navigation is no navigation. You can find that particular horror in the recent trend of “digital gardens”, where the user crawls their way through a site clicking on obfuscated links in incomplete pages and placeholder posts. Thanks a lot, Obsidian Publish & Co. 😒

Avoid thumbnail images

A relic of the nonsense SEO recommendations of the 2010s. Think back to the last great essay/post/stack you read and realise that you didn’t care about the thumbnail or cover image at all. AI-generated ones look especially terrible unless you take great care to make them consistent and styled to match your publication.

Even for social media cards I recommend just having one image that represents your site, and let it show up for all your posts, it’s perfectly alright. If you really want something different for each post, add a nicer view of your post title, like so:

Note: I must confess that I do like blogs where the thumbnail images are photos taken by the author themselves. They look really nice, even if they’re not particularly relevant to the content of the post.

Make categorisation useful

The traditional blog is ordered by time, which is a decent way to do things when the content consists of personal updates, but a poor experience if you’re writing more evergreen and/or domain-specific content. Instead, prefer organisation that complements your content and prolificacy (or lack thereof).

Topic

Don’t make topics too granular to start with (a simple “culture” section is better than a handful of sub-categorical tags). Only add them once you find that there are in fact multiple posts that fall under a tag. Few things are more disappointing for a reader than clicking on a tag and seeing a grand total of 2 posts.

Quality

There are two measures of this that I like:

• Most popular: The greatest hits and most shared posts. What was well-liked will probably still be worth reading.
• Personal favouries: A space to surface content you think is somewhat underrated or worth checking out (perhaps due to how different they are from your regular fare).

Length

It’s somewhat useful to give readers an expectation of how long a particular piece is, so that they can adjust their actions accordingly. Depending on length of individual posts and the site-wide average, they might:

• Save things to a read-it-later service
• Browse the whole site in one sitting
• Open certain posts in new tabs
• Decide to subscribe to your RSS feed

Use more content formats

My site has 3 main ones, which is what I recommend for most people.

• Lists: Evergreen collections that I update over time.
• Guides: Pieces of some heft, where I speak with some authority.
• Riffs: Short temporal posts, closest to the classic blog.

There are also Notebooks, but those are closer to “basket of links and excerpts that might lead to proper posts”, and not considered real publications.

But you can also have special sections for a bookshelf (with reviews?), media galleries, blogchains, etc. etc.

Use short URLs, if you can afford to

There’s nothing wrong with having your posts live at domain.com/posts/2025-12-25/post-url but there’s something really nice about being able to share URLs that look as neat as domain.com/post-url by quickly typing them out.

Let things feel like paper

Don’t scrolljack, don’t animate too much, don’t use WYSIWYG slop (if you can help it). Try to avoid Javascript-based nonsense (every time I see Next.js being used for a personal site, I say a silent prayer for the author’s soul), let webpages load like webpages.