You probably recognize his name, but if you don’t, you certainly recognize his work. Smashing Magazine is a juggernaut in the design and development web publishing world, and soon to cross over into traditional publishing as well. Vitaly is the most public figure behind Smashing Magazine, and I got the chance to ask him some questions I have always wanted to. Read on for my questions about naming posts, the strange meta nature of our work, and even the server power behind SM!
Chris: I like to rip on “list posts” and “roundups” in the design writing community sometimes, because I feel it’s a cheap ploy for traffic without any effort or voice. Smashing Magazine though, is one of the exceptions to the rule since your authors articles, even when roundups, are typically very comprehensive and full of original writing.
Vitaly: Yes, Chris, I see where your question is coming from. Indeed, at the moment we do see a huge problem with the content on the Web. Lists certainly dominate the scene and are used extensively to generate traffic, but in most cases they don’t deliver valuable, high-quality content that would let the blog / magazine grow and build a community around it.
We haven’t invented the lists back in 2006, but we did take this “lists” format to a new, more usable, advanced level. Over the last months we’ve been trying to focus on a solid mix of very different kinds of articles – advices, case studies, tutorials, insights from practice, original ideas and resources.
We strongly believe that the time of pure lists is now (finally) gone; pure link lists aren’t interesting any more, because popular design blogs invest a lot of time in research, preparation, writing and presentation of such articles. Lists are important, because they help to structure the Web, making it possible for users to keep in touch with recent developments and find useful information out there. This information needs to be sorted, edited, presented – and that’s exactly what most “good” lists manage to do.
Besides, lists still work and if you have some treasures that you are willing to share with your readers, it’s only right to do so, but you always need to strive for unique content, not just produce compilations for the sake of it. The more unique your content is, the more respect you’ll gain from your readers. That’s what it’s all about; sites that produce a list after list are doomed to vanish from the blogs landscape very soon.
Chris: I’d like to hear how you feel on the subject. For example, take these two fake post titles: “15 Amazing WordPress Admin Hacks!” or “Customizing the WordPress Admin Area” which could be for the exact same article. Which would be more successful?
Vitaly: Of course, the first one would attract more attention from a random user – no question about that. However, it doesn’t necessarily mean that it will be more successful, too. It depends on your ultimate goal – for instance, we have a major problem that many discussions on Smashing Magazine’s comments are quite disappointing, because we have many users from social media who aren’t really interested in our posts, but still check it out – either because the story made it to Digg’s front page or for any other reason.
If you want to strengthen your community and provide a nice place to discuss ideas presented in the post, it’s better to use titles like “Customizing the WordPress Admin Area” which would attract people that are truly interested in the topic. Also from the SEO point of view, that title is better. So essentially it depends on the context and your goals.
a book coming out, which looks like it’s going to be loaded with good stuff. Much like the website itself, many of the chapters are outsourced to other writers. How has that experience been? If this first book is successful, is traditional publishing something you are going to continue with (e.g. more books)?
Chris: You haveVitaly: the production of the book was a very intense process and a very exciting project. The Smashing Book is a result of the cooperation of creative and talented designers, writers and readers across the globe, making the Smashing Book a unique and very special book for designers and developers. We had some problems, but overall it was truly amazing to help all the little pieces come together, improve it over and over again, to end up with a solid, useful result. We hope that we did at least some things right.
In fact, it seems that we have experienced almost every single problem that can happen to a publisher when preparing a book: missed deadlines, chapters that were delivered after deadlines and still didn’t meet our quality guidelines and therefore were rejected and re-written by us, problems with the layouter and many many other things. It took much more time than we expected and caused much more problems that we were anticipating. Last three months were very hectic, but we have never given up and stubbornly worked through it.
We are very excited about the feedback from the readers and their opinions about the result of our little project. We tried our best to create a useful, interesting and exciting book for designers and web developers, but it’s up to users to decide if we did a good job or not. Traditional publishing is definitely an option, but we want to see how our first book will go first.
Chris: I’m curious if you face difficulty in growth or reader engagement at this stage in Smashing Magazine’s life. I can imagine viewers feeling like “I would comment…. but it will just be lost in an ocean of comments.” or “I don’t even need to bookmark SM posts in Delicious anymore, since I’d be pretty much bookmarking every single article.” Are these issues you face?
Vitaly: Yes, we do face similar issues at the moment. As a publisher, we always happy about professional discussions that are taking place in our comments section, but often it’s hardly possible, because there are too many comments. Still, we encourage our readers to participate and we also offered them a nice community forum where discussions indeed take place. In fact, we are planning some changes in our comments section very soon, so we hope to have tackled this issue in September – October.
However, we do not face the problem with social media. From the very beginning we’ve tried to do our best to provide users with useful high-quality content and it seems that our users respect that and forward links to our articles via social media – be it Delicious, StumbleUpon or Twitter. We appreciate every single bookmark, vote and tweet and I think that since we try to publish articles on a wide variety of design-related topics, it is hardly likely that many users will bookmark every single article on SM.
Chris: Writing about web design and development I find strangely meta some days. For example, publishing an article about web form usability and then seeing that some of your own forms don’t follow the tips. Or publishing an article about CSS sprites but noticing that on your own site you aren’t taking advantage of this everywhere you probably should be. Do you find this comes up a lot for you? Do you end up using stuff posted on Smashing Magazine right on the Smashing Magazine website itself?
Vitaly: Absolutely. When updating the site or discussing some front-end / back-end issues with my colleagues or friends, I always refer to Smashing Magazine as my first source. Since we have a very strong quality control, only manually hand-picked resources are presented in our posts which makes it plausible to search there for answers to problems related to design and web-development.
Of course, as web designers, we need to learn every single day and improve our skills by observing what other professionals do and, more importantly, how they do it. In fact, that’s exactly what the main purpose of Smashing Magazine is – a large platform where ideas can be exchanged and shared and where best design and programming practices are presented. We also learn from our articles and the articles in the Web design community every single day and if we find problems with our own site, we try to solve them in order to improve overall usability and user experience of the site.
Chris: I imagine your bandwidth usage is pretty huge. What kind of technology do you have in place to keep Smashing Magazine up and running and snappy, anything fancy?
Vitaly: We have a customized server cluster solution which has been installed, configured and is being monitored by our administrator Rene Schmidt. Overall, we have 7 servers now and we probably will have to purchase even more servers next year.
Hey Chris,
Awesome interview, really enjoyed hearing some of the back end side of Smashing.
I was particularly interested in the discussion/comment question because there doesn’t seem to be this spectacular format to handle mass discussion on popular blogs. There are now threaded comments, but the volume of dialog going on between everyone, sometimes simultaneously, makes it hard to follow one discussion while there are so many tangents.
On the back end side of commenting, with such a flood of good (and bad) comments, it’s a shame that some discussions can’t happen because it’s not feasibly possible for a writer to answer every comment.
Perhaps we’ll figure out new formats in the coming years to handle stable and involving dialog.
Really interesting interview Chris! Vitaly, does an amazing job over at SM and is great to work with.
http://twitter.com/Colorburned
Absolutely awesome,
and questions are so smart !!
thank you ..
Great interview. Thanks…
Great interview Chris and Vitaly, love it when posts are more personable than just a generated list.
Keep up the awesome work.
1. I like the Q/A styling. That’s new, isn’t it? Looks good. The way you have the sub-questions threaded under the parent is kinda neat.
2. And I just noticed the way the comment form’s labels fade out when you tab into them. Nice touch.
Who did that header graphic? That’s awesome!
I’m not sure who illustrated Vitaly, but mine is done by this guy:
http://www.ricardogimenes.com/blog/
I just put them both together for the graphic.
Yeah! They were funny!
Great article and I love the styling!!!
Awesome interview!
I love the illustration too – you looked like you’re drunk as a skunk, Chris! HA!
Awesome interview. Vitaly is a great editor to work with. Some interesting points about list posts in this interview and what type of traffic you’re ultimately trying to drive to your site. I like how you have a mix of content on SM and even with the list posts there is often a good description of each resource presented and high-quality resources chosen. Thx.
great interview. 7 servers! good stuff. Smashing is of course nothing less than legendary and a real asset to the design community. Interviews are the best blog posts imho. keep it up!
http://twitter.com/twbugg
Enjoy every point of this interview. Chris, thank you.
Great interview Chris. Really enjoyed reading.
Awesome interview with Vitaly. Smashing Magazine is definitely one awesome blog.
Wow, great interview i wish i could design like that lol.
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Great and very detailed interview! Thanks!
PS the illustrations are tight
Brilliant interview! thanks for sharing
Nice interview.
I’m not sure about typography on answers …
Great interview!
I just wish that you can ask more questions to him hehehe.
An incredibly nice interview… I always enjoy every interview articles with huge guy around…
Hi Chris,
Great interview, one of the view lately that I actually wanted to read from start to end. (didn’t skip through parts). That’s usually a good sign =)
Also, I’d like to say that on CSS-Tricks I usually do find the comments of higher quality, as in… It’s not un-attractive to comment for one or more reasons, and also it’s likely that I’d read through them (quick).
I think CSS-Tricks currently has the ideal balance between nice and cosey and big populair stuff.
Keep up,
Greetings,
Tem C
Problem is that this balance is upset when the quality observed then pushes a site’s popularity to the point where it gets flooded with more noise in its comments. I think comment highlighting systems are the way to go when the noise level gets too high. Segmenting out the more useful comments into seperate viewable area helps alleviate the noise and highlight the informative comments. It also gives those commenting sort of built-in incentive to post more than drivel to be found worthy of making the highlighted list. Woot.com is a great example of very high noise-level sight that excerpts its few useful (or amusing) posts into a featured comments section. It really facilitates the ability of the users to add to the community once the community becomes overrun with noise.
Thanks for the interview; great to meet the ‘man behind the curtain’ of SM!
I’ve been wondering if it would be useful for SM and others to categorize comments, starting with “Plaudits” and “Suggestions” — the first for the flood of “great post!” and the second for “Or you could try it this way…” That would be helpful to me as I wade through the articles.
Thanks for the enjoyable interview! It was interesting to hear Vitaly’s thoughts to your well-chosen questions.
A great interview. I totally agree with his answer to question 2, that sometimes, we use the title that draws the most attention, but not necessarily attracts the people who are really interested in the content