Mark's Blog

I totally agree, to the point of saying it is just common sense. I launched my blog quickly and easily using the default theme/decoration. The early adopters notice the lack of style but are mostly interested in the content/functionality. A year later, when I realized I was still blogging and a few people were still reading, I felt the need to have a nicer looking blog. Once you've proven the concept and maybe want to attract more audience/customers, for reasons of ego or profit, then you need to make it visually attractive/easy-to-use so that surfers stop a while.

Unless that's a literary effect, the author of your quote, makes it sound like there is one audience which changes over time. I suggest there are several potential audiences all the time, some looking for the information/entertainment you provide, others just browsing and ready to be enticed by good looks. Since the latter is larger than the former, authors who want to grow their audience fast find it easier to improve the looks rather than the content. One conclusion you may draw is that looks are no indicator of content. I won't say they're inversely related, because I also believe that the information seekers appreciate it when a website looks good (visual satisfaction includes ease of finding the info).

I don't feel aesthetically challenged, but uncreative, so I'm lucky my wife Sonja could dress up my blog nicely, with a bit of tweaking I did myself.

Regarding Macs, my deliverance is at hand: Sonja has been wanting one for a while, so her birthday is the big excuse to upgrade--plus she's earned it for her graphics work. Not only is the 5-yr old PC running slow when she opens 20 images in Photoshop, but we want to edit video, and a friend who writes software for the Mac (and lives on Kauai) confirms that Macs make it easy. From what I read, it's not OSX that edits video (a pardonable mistake from a Linux-tweak-the-OS-before-I-run-apps user), but the iLife software that comes with it for "free" (I will put up with the stupid i-everything names if they just work as promised). The last straw that broke open my wallet was that the software that came with our top-of-the-line Sony movie camera lets you splice videos only at half-second intervals. Sony has great video technology, but their "presentation" is lacking, from Engrish in the docs to hobbled software (then again, computer-owning video-editing customers are probably not their mainstream market).

Just because I have been pricing Macs right now, I can say they don't seem that much more expensive, maybe 10-20%. It's hard to compare real performance (now with Intel DuoCores), but on MB of disk and memory and equivalent peripherals, it seemed like a reasonable surcharge for their reputed quality. Granted, I only checked Dell, and you can probably get a screaming machine for half the price if you build it from parts, but it seemed to me that Macs fell below the price as a function of quality+performance+ease of purchase line for PC. I have heard some bad stories about some hardware problems (fans, connectors) so I went ahead and paid and extra $120 for 3 years of coverage.

It's true that your blog looks very nice since you updated the layout, and that it made since to use the default for a while before tweaking.

Your attraction to Macs for what they do rather than what they look like belies the notion that, "fashion, visual appeal, and aesthetic comfort becomes a priority." At least not for the audience that includes you. Not only are you right about the audience that looks for visual appeal potentially not being the same audience that looks for form following function, but I'm not sure that complicated products mature very quickly to the point where form becomes almost as important as function. There are a lot of us out there driving around in ugly cars, using ugly computers. If the price difference is not big, maybe the better looking product will win. But if it were really true that ugly is bad, Mac would've beaten Windows long ago.