Feeling Homey Online

I began my search for home design and/or interior decorating blogs. Though I do not have a necessary interest in the subject, I figured a blog focused on design would be a great place to view well-designed and visually pleasing webpages.

The first blog I explored was Young House Love, whose webpage was exactly how I expected it to look. Naturally, the design of the page drew me in right off the bat with bright colors and legible text- it had a very professional look. The homepage offered links to other miscellaneous pages categorized by subjects such as "projects," "galleries" and "forums." These links made it easy to navigate the site as a whole and served as a way to organize separate ideas.  I enjoyed the content of the blog because it offered ideas for DIY projects and shopping advice for home decor, but the site owner also used the blog as a personal outlet to post her own projects, ideas and other blogs.

The second site I visited was titled Addicted 2 Decorating. Visually, I actually ended up enjoying this blog the most out of the three based on its overall aesthetics and layout.  The homepage had a section called "Featured Posts" which I thought was a really great way to capture the viewers attention. On this site, a brief synopsis of each individual post was offered. Each one was separated by a border and a bold title to help reiterate the subject of each post, as seen below. 

Apartment Therapy was my overall favorite blog. It provided a very broad spectrum of topics and offered tons and tons of articles and information. The categories varied from renovating ideas to DIY articles to housekeeping advice and so on. Even further, each category was broken down into more specific categories; for example, once you've reached the "Style" page, links such as "projects," "green living," "budget living" and "good questions" were provided, (shown below). Apartment Therapy's site even gives viewers to create an account and login in order to request update notifications and join specific forums. 

Overall, I realized that one of the most important aspects of online blogs and websites are the visual designs. No matter how "good" or "substantial" the actual writing could be, the site needs to be visually pleasing in order to keep the viewer's attention. It's an interesting concept, really, because it shows that successful digital writing relies on a combination of aspects, not just a compilation of words.