DesignShack comes with a “design analysis” concept. They have looked at four popular platforms: the homepages of ExpressionEngine, Textpattern, Wordpress and Blogger.

Quote:

ExpressionEngine

What works:

1. A professional, well designed colour scheme
2. The use of tabbed content on the homepage to show a greater amount of information in a visually appealing way
3. The website is powered by Expression Engine itself
4. Unlike Blogger, the icons and graphics used and professional and well crafted

What doesn’t work:

1. The bold logo for the testimonial section immediately draws the eye – away from the main Expression Engine logo
2. Due to the heavy graphical nature of the page, loading time is slightly longer than the other designs

Pretty good analysis, although they were a little lenient on the Textpattern site since they use it. The platform is much nicer than their site would indicate. I think their main programmer taking a job with WordPress was the beginning of the end.

The WordPress redesign is pretty dang good, as you’d expect from Happy Cog.

One thing I do like about Textpattern compared to the others is that you start with a blank slate. The default theme has a basic layout and no styling. I can see WordPress and Blogger needing to do this since many of their users are non-technical, but it seems the average Expression Engine person skews slightly more-technical (I could be totally off, just an idea).

I guess one of these days I’ll create a good blank theme with some styling hooks and release it. EE needs the equivalent of the Sandbox theme for WordPress.