Suggestions for vBulletin Blogs - Less is More!
 

vBulletin forum is a great product so when you see they offer a blog it's only natural that you want to buy it. But once you do I find a lot of people are really disappointed. It's really hard to use, it doesn't look like a blog, and it has way to many options. Because of this blogs are rarely used even on very high traffic sites.

Here are a few suggestions that I think will help improve the product.

Layout - Boxes Boxes Boxes!:
Like it or not when people think of a blog they think of a certain layout. A typical blog layout is the post and comments to the left (nice clean layout without EVERYTHING needing to be in boxes) and the authors info and categories to the right. Sure, there are variations to this design but one thing is for sure... the current layout with everything being in it's own box is terrible. Boxes work in forum posts and in comments under a blog post but to put the blog post itself in a box and all the sidebar options... it just doesn't work. It's confusing to look at. The blog layout needs to be cleaned up.

Give Bloggers Exposure
vBulletin blogs don't offer any self promotion for the blogger. It would be easy to import the bloggers bio and url and put it under the profile picture and that would be a good start. I've done that on one of my sites and it's helped out a lot. But this should be standard or at least an option.

Example:
Attachment 30368

Less Options - At least let us turn them off!:
Just because you can doesn't mean you should. vBulletin blogs offer an amazing amount of un-needed options. You can add your own categories, move boxes around, customize the sidebar, create your own sidebar box, say who can and can't comment, provide a spam prevention key, etc, etc...

My users can't even figure out how to make a blog post because there are way to many options. I was trying to create a walk through for them and I didn't even know what all these options where for and I've been using vBulletin for 6 years as an admin. This is a classic example of techies thinking more is better when that is simply not the case.

I'd like to let users name their blog, and then make a post to pre-defined categories just like how the forums work. Can you imagine how confusing a forum would be if ever user could create their own forum topics and post to them? Tags are fine but does every blogger really need their own categories? vBulletin blogs enables me to allow for 0 categories for a user but under the users blog control panel categories is still an option which makes your site look broken. You don't seem to be able to turn anything off fully. The only option I've found is to remove the link for blog options but then they can't name their blog.
I really have no desire for users to be able to control the sidebar, ad custom blog pages, categories, have a search box, etc...

Maybe you can give people the option to enable these features, but also let us turn them off!

Blog Homepage:
The blog homepage is once again confusing. Boxes everywhere with a break down of recent comments and such on the bottom. Just a nice simple blog layout would work best. One post over another like techcruch, engadget, or most other blogs have.

Avatars vs Profile Pictures:
I can understand why you have the bloggers profile picture at the top of their post and users avatars in the comments. That makes sense. But why does the authors avatar show up instead of their profile picture when your looking at recent blogs? There needs to be some consistency there that's lacking.



There's more that needs to be changed but these are some of the biggest. These along with universal search in vBulletin 4.0 Suite would make this a usable product. There's no reason why blogs can't be a big hit on any community. Blogs are one way conversation and forums are two way conversations. Let's fix the problems and make this work.

Thanks.

Attached Images http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/images/attach/jpg.gif blogslayout1.jpg‎ (59.0 KB)