Elevating Environment Discourse

acornsfall.com

This is actually a site my brother in law set up about a year ago when they were having their first kid. While the content of the site is mostly social stuff for family and friends, I like how stripped down it is, with simple navigation even while integrating other services like Twitter, Flickr, archived posts, and comments.

http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/

This site is very simple, and there are some design things that I don't like about it at all. But I think it does a good job pointing out a good general style with the main blog post content in the middle of the page in order of chronology. Navigation is limited as most of the content is from the blog posts themselves. Really emphasizes the daily updates instead of complicated navigation.

http://www.politifact.com/

Although the content of this site is more produced than what we will likely be doing, I like how the page breaks up the different sections while still presenting a coherent whole. There is the Obama section on the right, a main article at the top middle, the "truth o-meter" going down the middle of the page. I thought it was something to consider if we want to separate content from the different bloggers on one main page.

http://www.fangraphs.com/

This is another site that isn't all that attractive, but it is incredibly useful in terms of sorting through a lot of information and finding what you are looking for. They have the main content article down the middle, but they also have well organized stats, links, recent stories, etc. If we are going to have a lot of content, I suggest looking at this site to see how they do it and what works well.