10 Reasons I Don’t Like Smashing Magazine

Ok, so the title may be smothered in irony, but I just couldn’t help myself!

Smashing Magazine seems to have thrown itself into the limelight as design and development’s ‘must-read’ web magazine. But, it’s time for a change, because it really could do better.

Before you jump right to the bottom and call me a heathen for not liking smashing magazine, read the rest of this post.

The first thing that really annoys me about Smashing Magazine is illustrated in the title of this blog post. Almost all of their articles are in list format. There’s nothing wrong with that, I’ve written posts in list format. It’s a simple and effective way to communicate. But does almost EVERY article have to begin:

• 10 Awesome Examples…..
• 15 Ways To…
• 20 Reasons…
• 10 Great WordPress…

I’m already bored of the article before I begin reading it. There’s another, quite practical reason these titles are annoying. You can never remember if you’ve already read the article. Because the titles are so similar, it’s difficult to scan-read and remember where you last were during your last visit.
Very annoying.

There is also a dearth of truly ‘original’, high-quality content at Smashing Magazine. Almost every article is a ‘Google, copy, paste’ job. Whilst I do agree that this can be quite time-consuming, there’s nothing that can replace the quality of brilliant original intellectual content. It’s one of the reasons I spend my sunday afternoon reading the ‘Observer’ (The Guardian). Sometimes we don’t want the straight and boring BBC account of the news, we long for both objective reporting, and a selection of opinion columns.

So why should the web development industry be any different?

We already have services like digg, stumbleupon, twitter, delicious etc for finding content. What I think we need is more of a magazine, and less of a link-database.

Web developers aren’t fickle consumers who are simply interested in crap-loads of free stuff. We’re usually self-taught intellectuals who appreciate fine debate, opinion, comment, and thought. With the status smashing magazine has right now, they could really benefit from such content. – Stop treating us like idiots, and give us some more substance!

Now, don’t get me wrong, I know that there are some fantastic articles over at Smashing Magazine, but recently the site is getting worse and worse.

Please Smashing Magazine, bring back the old ways! Release some more substantial content, and maybe your comments content will no longer be: ‘cool’, ‘wow’, ’sexy’, ‘beautiful’, and ‘thanks’… But instead filled with the debate of some of the brightest and dimmest minds from around the world.
When you do that once more, I will again subscribe to your RSS feed. I will read every new article, I will tell my friends, family, my dog (CSS Guru). But until then, I’m saying goodbye for a while.

Feel free to tell me I’m wrong. But that’s the idea of opinion, right?