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I am about to re-design an existing blog for a company and I have a very good flexibility in terms of layout-design and IA.

There are many galleries to get some inspiration for the design part, but It seems there are not so many articles about the content organization.

I assume that the structure of modern blogs comes from an evolutionary process, and features functionalities that in the past where not known.. We can benefit now from tag clouds, structured comment sections, typography and other features (just to mention some).

It seems that the information architecture for a blog is quite standard, there are no big variations except for the layout/design/colours.. In that case, are there any design guidelines for blogs? Is there any cutting edge feature you would like to suggest?

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  • Not specific to blogs, so going in the comments. Information Architecture for the World Wide Web. – Joshua Drake Apr 13 '12 at 13:24
  • I'm not sure there is an answer to this question. Every site is different, even blogs. Smashing magazine is a blog, as too is alertbox and they are both perfectly suited to their audience but completely different in style and design. What exactly are you looking for in an answer to this question? – JonW♦ Apr 13 '12 at 13:46
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This might not be a fun answer, but I would say you want the IA of your company blog to be as standard as possible. Blogs are great because they feature a small amount of content and focus attention on that. A new organizational method might distract users from actually reading the posts.

Make your design as slick and interesting as possible but I would guess most of your traffic will come from direct links which makes the design more relevant to their UX than how easy it is to find similar posts.

Look at the Google or Google LatLong blogs -- not much in the way of IA (or even design) but the content is really the star.

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You could always take a look at a couple of successful blogs.

The above focus on tech, to one degree or another, so you would probably want to seek out blogs more directly related to the field in question.

You also need to consider the purpose of the blog. Is this for:

Is it simply a link dump, or are they trying to develop more of an article style?

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