Most of us blog using Blogger or Movable Type or some such package. Not surprisingly, all blogs tend to look the same -- a banner, a column of blog content, and a sidebar or two with ads, links to archives, email links, and so on.

Essentially everything on one page, living on the edges of the blog that dominates. Why is that?

The simple reason seems to be that blogging software designers think of the blog as the be all and end all of a website. So for them, the blog and the website become synonymous. We tend to think of how to jam the banner and the sidebar and so forth into "blogging template", resulting in bloated webpages that can take minutes to download.

That's backwards. Completely and utterly backwards.

You start with a website. A home page, an "about me" page, an affiliates page, a photo gallery, whatever. Use good design rules for clarity and speed. On one or more of those pages, the content will be blog postings, as opposed to photographic content or static text content. Content is just content. Don't worry about that yet. Just put in "under construction" and finish building up all your webpages and testing them out.

So you've finally finished your site. Now what? You process certain files through the blogging software. Basically, the blogging software is just a big pre-processor connected to a database. You've already populated the database with text consisting of simple HTML snippets (not full pages, just streams of paragraphs organized into dated entries). We call those "posts", and they should just be paragraphs that can be placed into any HTML page between the body tags. As the blogging software takes each file of your site, it scans for blogging tags (things like MTEntries in Movable Type). These tags have simple semantic meaning to the blogging software, and direct the blogging software to select specific content from the database (most recent entries, entries by date, entries by category, whatever). All that selected content is then injected into the location marked by that tag.

That's how I've got multiple views of my blog for major streams I tend to write about. I select content by category (and a couple of other criteria) and inject that HTML into holes left in the webpages I've prepared for accepting that HTML. By thinking of it that way, I focus on developing the pages first, and as elaborately as I care to, without worrying about all those blog tags and blog content. When I'm ready, I throw in the tags, and add the file to a list that I've marked as requiring processing each time the blog database changes (that is, everytime I add a new post).

By moving the blogging software out of my mindspace when thinking about Angry in the Great White North, I was able to come up with a design that promotes speed and usability, resurrects my favourite books and movie lists by pushing them on pages that are not loaded unless desired, and gives me room to create blogging tools like the Canadian Political Blogosphere Search Page. Of course, I created several dedicated pages for blog content, and populating them was a snap. Now my site looks a lot less "bloggy", which is what I was going for.

Several people have emailed me to say that the new look takes a bit of getting used to, but once they shifted from the traditional (and tired, and inefficient) blog approach to a general purpose website design, the new site works very well.

Don't forget that your can reach any of the subpages directly from a bookmark, so if you want to just see the blog, go for it (see the Subscribe page for more details).

So if you have ever thought about just chucking the traditional blog look for something else, go for it. The trick is to stop thinking about your site as a blog and scouring the internet for new "blog templates" that all look exactly the same. Just come up with the site first! Then look for the spot for the content to go, and get it in there.

Trust me when I say it feels pretty good to loose that old blog schema.

Note: Some blogging systems aren't all that flexible. Blogger only allows one template, and if you are using Blogger to host your site with a blogspot.com blog, then this is your home page too. But more advanced systems like Movable Type make no assumptions about the inputs and outputs to the processor. That means your home page can be static, and Movable Type can be directed to process certain secondary pages as part of a larger website.