Some of the more enlightening/worthwhile results from a num­ber of stud­ies on design and usabil­ity con­ducted by Smash­ing Mag­a­zine, found via their otherwise-ordinary 10 Use­ful Usabil­ity Find­ings and Guide­lines article:

Gen­eral design deci­sions taken by the top 50 blogs (part two):

  • 92% use a fixed width lay­out with 56% varying the width between 951 and 1000px.
  • For body text, 90% use Ver­dana, Lucida Grande, Arial or Geor­gia with 78% using a font size between 12 and 14px.
  • Head­lines are typ­i­cally Arial or Geor­gia (52%), with a font size between 17 and 25px.
  • The front page presents excerpts of 10–20 posts in 62% of cases.
  • 50% offer links to related and/or pop­u­lar posts.
  • 90% of foot­ers con­tain copy­right infor­ma­tion, 40% con­tain links to About pages and 30% to con­tact information.
  • 76% pro­vide ad-free articles.
  • 54% pro­vide social icons under the post.
  • 66% dis­play RSS but­tons above the main lay­out area, while a sim­i­lar per­cent­age use the ‘stan­dard’ RSS icon (as opposed to a text link) and employ only one RSS feed.
  • Only 5 blogs use tag clouds (10%) and 11 (22%) use pagination.
  • Nobody cares about stan­dards (only 2 conform).

A study of the typog­ra­phy used on the top 50 blogs touched on some of the above and then went into more detail:

  • Sans-serif fonts are more pop­u­lar for both head­lines and body copy (although not by a large margin).
  • Head­lines: Geor­gia, Arial or Hel­vetica between 18 and 29 pixels.
  • Body copy: Geor­gia, Arial, Ver­dana or Lucida Grande between 12 and 14 pixels.
  • Header font size ÷ Body copy font size = 1.96.
  • Line height (pix­els) ÷ body copy font size (pix­els) = 1.48.
  • Line length (pix­els) ÷ line height (pix­els) = 27.8.
  • Space between para­graphs (pix­els) ÷ line height (pix­els) = 0.754.
  • Opti­mal num­ber of char­ac­ters per line: between 55–75 (although 75–85 is more popular).
  • Body text is left-aligned, image replace­ment is rarely used and links are either under­lined or high­lighted with bold or color.

100 unspec­i­fied sites were used for this analy­sis of web form struc­ture and design (part two):

  • 93% use single-page sign-up forms.
  • 41% of sites attract vis­i­tors by explain­ing the ben­e­fits of registration.
  • Ver­ti­cally arranged fields are pre­ferred to hor­i­zon­tally arranged fields (86%).
  • 82% of sites don’t ask for e-mail con­fir­ma­tion, although 72% required pass­word confirmation.
  • Only 45% of sites used the thank-you mes­sage to moti­vate users to pro­ceed with explor­ing the ser­vices of the site.