Smashing Magazine: Weblog vs. Books

I stumbled upon Smashing Magazine about three years ago when I was still in high school and still a newbie designer. Back in the day, it was the most popular web development blog in the blogosphere, and it's retained most of that glory as it has moved forward to become the network site and aggregator that it is today.

Three years ago, the Smashing content was like pure gold. Every article, since I had no idea what I was doing, seemed to bring new and awesome ideas about design and other web development topics. Since it's inception, Smashing profited mostly on list posts. The list post is a great way to collect information into one place. Titles that frequented the Smashing Magazine headlines included "40 New and Fresh Free Fonts" and "10 Simple Effects With jQuery." These articles were a round-up method of delivering as much information as possible in a short amount of text. Itemized lists are easy for readers to consume and skim.

List posts still exist, but they have, for the most part, departed from Smashing Magazine. Smashing hit a point just over a year ago where they were running the risk of losing profitability. Advertisement driven, the site was losing readers and losing money. Their plan to solve this was to refactor their current content to be more sophisticated and polished in a book form. They released their book, but continued to see profits decline.

In what I feel was a last effort, they called on the community. They wrote a post that let everyone know what was happening and that they needed to sell books. The community responded, and Smashing was back on their feet. They now had an important task at hand: become more profitable, and do it quickly.

A Redesign and The Smashing Network

Smashing Magazine rolled out the smashing network and a site redesign about a year and a half ago. This allowed other blogs to popularize their content through SM, and SM saw it's traffic increase. Now, the Smashing Network is a large community of active, intelligent writers that are dedicated to producing amazing content. If you were part of the network, you got to have a neat sticker on your site to denote that your blog is part of the club.

The Smashing Network emblem of truth. Wear it with pride.

So what happened to the content of SM itself? To be honest, when the Smashing Network rolled out, I saw this as the death of SM content and removed it from my radar. However, their content in the last year has stayed relevant and top notch. So what really turned me off of Smashing?

The redesign didn't serve their content in the way I wanted to see it. I went through "redesign shock". Their advertisements were bursting from the sidebar into the main content area. Smashing was probably making more money than ever while I was sifting through ads to get something from their content. So, I tuned out their blog and continued to use the Network to connect to a few sites I enjoy.

The top of every Smashing Magazine article: a large advertisement.

When I view an article on Smashing, I can't get past the title without having to jump my eyes over a huge advertisement. On my 13" MacBook Pro, the window is a small 800 pixels high at best. A 250px by 250px image turns out to take up nearly a third of the page vertically, and I have to scroll further to get to even the first paragraph. As I continue to read, everything becomes more clear as I move past the fold and break past of the sidebar from hell. The rest of the post is easy and enjoyable to read, but I'm caught in their daunting amount of advertisements for at least three or four folds of scrolling.

Smashing Books

I've already mentioned that I don't enjoy reading their content using their current design. However, yesterday I decided I would pick up one of their books. They were running a deal on AppSumo where you could purchase their five top-selling books for only $20. This looked like a good deal, but I didn't have it in me to drop $20 on books at the moment. However, I looked on their shop to find that the books were half price there as well.

I purchased Professional Web Design as an intro into their published works. As I began to page through it (scroll, in the more literal sense, since it is a PDF), I noticed that it was repurposed content from their site. But, I didn't care. The content was great. It was clearly written, offered good points and ideas, and felt like a book, not just repurposed content.

I plan on buying more books. As well, I'm trying to find ways around their current site design and found an RSS reader to do the trick. Thankfully, this book helped me realize that SM's content is still as great as ever. In fact, their article today on "Designing for Android" is one of the best I've read to date.

Smashing's Future

I don't have any statistics on how much money the pull in from advertisements. Nor do I have statistics on how many books they sell or how well they profit from the books. However, I know Smashing Magazine has great content. I worry that they have flipped their problems in the last year and a half. It used to be that their content was accessible but in an unexciting list format. Now, their content is inaccessible but is better than ever.

Another site that does what Smashing does very well is A List Apart. While A List Apart has been delivering incredible content since the early 2000's and beyond, they have also hit the correct spot in their community by producing eBooks and holding conferences. They have capitalized on a network of developers hungry to hear words straight from the mouths of the people setting the standard. What they have built has benefited everyone in the design community, including themselves.

A List Apart wins over Smashing Magazine every time on design and aesthetics. Now, I understand they are not necessarily competing; aside from the content differences, SM falls into the "blog as a business" category whereas A List Apart is simply design philanthropy. However, their models are similar, and I think Smashing could learn a lot.

I'd love to see them produce more books and continue their forays into publishing. They produce good content, and I hope that they continue to find ways to deliver it cleanly while still profiting.