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RSS: Best Design Practices And Icons
2Jul2009 Filed under: Free Icons, Free Web design Tools, Free usefull stuff Author: MarioRSS is extremely simple and yet so powerful. Not only does every weblog need it for content syndication; the number of RSS subscribers is a metric for weblog’s popularity and its success in the blogosphere. However, although millions do use RSS, hundreds of millions don’t. That’s no good news, since RSS offers a bunch of advantages that can boost your productivity and improve your information consumption in a quite elegant and easy-to-use way.
In this article we give an overview of what RSS is and present best design and usability-practices for design and placement of RSS-buttons on a web site. We also showcase dozens of free RSS-icons and provide you with references to related tutorials and how-tos.
What is RSS?
RSS is basically a family of formats used to publish (not broadcast!) frequently updated content such as blog entries, news headlines or podcasts. The main advantage for users lies in the fact that they don’t have to keep up with their favorite web sites checking them manually. Instead, it is done in an automated manner so you get notified automatically once the sites are updated.
RSS content can be read using feed readers such as Bloglines or aggregators such as Netvibes. The user subscribes to a feed by entering the feed’s link into the reader or by clicking an RSS icon in a browser. The feed-reader checks the user’s subscribed feeds regularly for new content, downloading any updates that it finds — automatically.
To get an instant idea of how it is actually done you should take a look at RSS in Plain English which explains the basics of RSS in 3.5 minutes in Plain English.
RSS != XML
Since more and more users and bloggers indeed use RSS Syndication, it is gradually becoming a standard (or already is a de-facto-standard). This reflects in a number of approaches designers choose to animate their visitors for feed-subscription. The early feed-buttons have been labeled with “XML”, which is wrong, because this term stands not for the syndication format itself, but for the markup-language it uses. You can compare calling RSS-feeds XML with calling web sites HTML which obviously doesn’t really make any sense.
This is what it looked like few years ago (and in some cases still exists nowadays).
Source: cadenhead.org
Standard RSS-icon
SS is used on most sites which are updated frequently; the format has also found its path in browsers and software applications. Therefore it’s reasonable to make sure that visitors can identify and recognize RSS quickly and easily. And this is why the standard RSS-icon is used in most cases.
The common RSS-icon
However, the Web is a creative place for experiments. Variations and modifications are common and interesting to observe. Creative designers come up with unusual solutions to integrate the RSS-button in their design and ensure that the overall site design is perfect.
The button itself doesn’t need to look like the standard RSS-button. For instance, it doesn’t need to have an orange color; shadows, frames and other visual effects can be used effectively to convey the message and attract visitor’s eye. What is important, however, is that despite all modifications the icon remains recognizable. This is not always the case.
If you’d like to use them you’ll find a quite comprehensive choice of possible variations offered for free download as icon sets. Before using them make sure you’ve read the license agreement carefully.
- You can check for RSS icons in the Free Social Bookmarking Icons
- Also I will add up a post dedicated only to RSS FEED icons.
