@Sabrina and @Dave - I agree that there aren’t universals, but there ARE universal differences. Thanks for the feedback :)

An interesting post (and some nice graphs  ).

I’d agree with what Sabrina said about universals – I think that generalising on something like that can be difficult.

When answering your question on the design of blog content, I rated it higher than the other visual design questions. For me, this is more important because I read most blogs through an RSS reader. I find that properly designed (i.e. marked-up) content looks better (proper headings, lists, images, etc) in an RSS reader as it will render these in a consistent way.

Thats not to say that I have ignored the heuristic approach to the blog and have tried to make it easy to navigate with relevant categories for posts, a search area and different link categories so they are easy to spot.

I think there’s a flaw in this survey though. It assumes that “blog navigation” (and “web page navigation” for that matter) are universals - ie, that all blogs have the same navigation, or that all web pages do. They do not. This is why massive amounts of time, money and data crunching go into UI design and user testing.

Some blogs are easy to navigate, and some are difficult. Even small decisions can make visitors more likely to deep drill a blog. Single column sidebars will give you a lower bounce rate, as will dropping all default nomenclature and making concious decisions about what you call things.

“More about…” makes much more sense than “Categories,” for example - Categories tells you what it is, sort of, but doesn’t tell you what you can do with it.

But still, this is good and useful data and I’ll use it, so thanks for that :)

PS: “Do as I say, not as I do.” My blog is a very pretty trainwreck. I know this. I’m gearing up for a re-design, with many of these issues in mind. Ugh.