Facelift

I have spent this past week giving the Scandinavian Stamps blog a major "face lift."

I was looking at my posts, and realized that the site had not been "modernized" since I started it, back in early 2006. That's 4 1/2 years ago.

On the greater scale of things, 4 1/2 years is not a long time. As stamp collectors, we look at "4 1/2 years ago" and think it is "new." Yet, in the modern age of the Internet, 4 1/2 years is a huge amount of time.

For one, there are LOADS of easy-to-use features you can add to blogs, that simply weren't there, in early 2006. Also, monitor technology has come a long way since then... and the old blog format-- built to conform with a standard that a web page is best left "under 1028 pixels wide" was out of date... and the blog looked "dated" and "tired" by today's standards.

It also made me think a little bit about stamp collecting, itself... and the "crisis" a lot of people seem to think the hobby is facing, in this technological age. And it occurred to me that we cannot hope to attract young "fresh blood" to the hobby if we come across as "old" and "out of date" and not technologically savvy.

I'm not saying we shouldn't collect "old stamps" anymore-- I'm just saying we need to get with the times and present our collection of "Queen Victoria plate varieties" in a manner appropriate for today, and not in a manner best left back in Queen Victoria's time...

Cluttered Web Sites: Are stamp collectors cluttered in the head?

I spent some time today, looking around the Internet at various web sites related to stamp collecting.

To be honest, I wasn't very impressed with what I found.

Please! No cluttered web sites!

Maybe that sounds a bit blunt and rude, so let me clarify. I was actually very impressed with the volume and variety of philatelic web sites and blogs out there. Seems a LOT of stamp collectors have found their way to the world wide web and are sharing lots of interesting content about stamp collecting and philately.

What left me feeling very UN-impressed-- and even a little frustrated-- was the sheer number of poorly designed, willy-nilly, cluttered web sites out there; web sites that looked more like a going-out-of-business sales flyer than a way to present one's treasured stamps.

Now, you might be asking yourself why I even care. Good question. So here's the point:

If your web site is made up of dozens of seemingly unrelated little text boxes with text in different colors and fonts, arranged in a way that suggests NO planning whatsoever... your web site design, itself, is actually taking AWAY from your attempts to share with other people. Think, for a moment, about what an album page looks like. It is pretty plain, with borders around each stamp, and maybe a little bit of descriptive text. Odds are your stamps are NOT mounted up on paper from the most recent Wal-Mart flyer, right? So WHY would you build a web site made up to look like a patchwork quilt with blinking lights?

Think simple. Let the STAMPS tell the story... not the "wrapping" (aka web site). Keep it simple...