As I mentioned before, outbrain's blog rating widget will soon be available (you can signup for it here). In the mean time, we wanted to discuss some of the principals that guided us in designing the widgets.
I talked about the 1st principal here - Our widget is a service to you, the blogger, and not a viral distribution platform for outbrain. Today I want to discuss the 2nd principal we've tried to follow:
Principal #2 - Blending in with your design
When designing the rating widget, we wanted to make it work well with as many host blogs as possible. Initially we thought we'd do what mostly all widget developers do - give you a tool for customizing the look&feel to match the design of your blog. But that really sucks... After all - you've already designed your blog... so why should you worry about re-designing the ratings widget (or any other widget) over and over?
So we made it our goal to automatically inherit as much as we could from your blog's design, without requiring *any* customization or settings from you.
The design and colors of the stars are consistent - we think that provides for the best usability with color schemes that people are already used to, and which help your readers quickly find the most interesting posts.
But all the rest - fonts, text color, background colors, text size, etc - those are all inherited automatically from your site to ensure that the look&feel of the outbrain widget is consistent with the rest of your page.
Here are two great example - they both use the identical widget code (with no custom settings), yet each one inherits the look&feel of the blog on which it's hosted on:
Aaron Brazell's Technosailor blog uses a light gray background with black Lucida fonts. The outbrain widget looks as if it were designed together with the rest of the site:
In the mean time, Steve uses for his kayaking blog a dark-blue background image, with small light-blue text:
Two totally different site designs, using the exact same widget, with 0 configuration effort. Cool!
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Interested in getting this widget for your blog? Signup on our home page, or shoot me an email to [galai at outbrain dot com].
outbrain will be sponsoring the very first CenterNetwork's Mixer event here in NYC. Event details are:
