The document analyzes common visual design elements found on 154 blogs. It finds that single author blogs predominate, with around 48% of single author blogs by males and 50% by females. It then analyzes the frequency of various design elements across the blogs, such as use of custom images (present in around 44% of blogs), colors in headings (42%), custom colors (40%), and custom banners (22%). For most elements, female bloggers tended to use them more frequently than male bloggers.

1. Common Visual Design Elements of Weblogs Lois Scheidt and Elijah Wright

2. Background

3. Methodology Random sample of 154 weblogs collected September 21, 2003 Collected from blog-tracking website http:// blo.gs / Grounded theory approach was used to develop a coding scheme consisting of 23 elements Coding categories are not exclusive

4. Sex of authors Single author weblogs predominate in this corpus with 147 Seven have two or more authors 48.3% of the single author weblogs have male authors 49.7% have female webloggers Of the 7 multiple author weblogs; 2 have all male authors, 1 has all female authors, and 4 have both male and female authors

5. 0 video 0 music 0.60% custom cursors 0.60% custom calendar layout 1.90% scrolling headers 2.60% too wide 2.60% language 3.20% text effects 3.90% photo background 3.90% per-post icons 4.50% smilies 6.40% color clash 7.80% graphical dividers 7.80% graphical dividers 12.30% custom font 17.50% color bars 18.20% data representations 22.10% custom banner 24.70% custom table borders 33.80% color alteration 40.30% custom colors 41.60% color in headings/titles 43.50% custom images 51.90% CMC elements Incidence across all Weblogs Code

6. Custom images Custom images were found in 43.5% of the weblogs analyzed Female webloggers posted 46.3% of the custom images Males utilized 47.8% of the images Images were posted on 4.5% of the weblogs being operated by multiple webloggers Unknown gender webloggers utilized 1.5% of the custom images in their weblog design

7. Colors in titles and headings Colors in titles and headings, any color other then black or white, are present in 41.6% Female webloggers utilized 40.6% of colored text headings Male webloggers used colors other than black and white in 51.6% of the weblogs Unknown gender webloggers and weblogs with multiple webloggers account for 7.8% of those using color in their text headings, 3.1% and 4.7% respectively.

8. Custom color text Custom color text was present in 40.3% Female webloggers used significantly more color with 58.1% of the weblogs displaying this customization Male webloggers used only 38.7% of the custom color Multiple weblogger weblogs used 3.2% of the custom color text

9. Custom table borders Thirty-eight (24.7%) of the weblogs had custom table borders Female webloggers displayed 57.9% of the custom table borders While 39.5% were by male webloggers Multiple weblogger weblogs used 2.6% of the custom table borders

10. Color alteration Color alterations, changing the base color of a common weblog template, are present in 33.8% of the weblogs 57.7% of the color alteration was used by female webloggers 40.4% was used by male webloggers 1.9% was used by webloggers of unknown gender

11. Custom banners Custom banners were present in 22.1% Female webloggers presented custom banners in 41.2% of the weblogs in the sample Male webloggers displayed the characteristic in 47.1% of the weblogs Unknown gender and multiple weblogger categories accounted for four custom banner weblogs (5.9% each)

12. Conclusion Individual webloggers do not tend to make substantive structural changes to the default layout of their sites Design schemes are frequently minimally modified versions of templates provided by software selected by the end user An overwhelming proportion of the customizations we observed came in the sidebar