As designers, our role is to curate content for our users, to make it clear and approachable. And our best friend in presenting our content effectively is the grid, but it isn’t content itself. Showing the grid adds no value to regular user and adds an unnecessary visual element that detracts from the hierarchy of the real content.

That said, there are exceptions, namely, when the grid is actually content. One example, might be on the site of a design firm, where they’re trying to show “designedness.” In cases like that, a subtle presentation of the grid could be acceptable. But those are the vast minority of cases.

The grid won’t mean a lot to the average web surfer. They’ll just wonder why they have “squared paper” on their website. I know if I added a visible grid to one of my client’s sites I’d get an angry phone call pretty quickly.

I guess a design could even lose a little bit of it’s magic if the grid is shown, especially for complex layouts where the grid isn’t obvious at first.

Avoid them to avoid the cliche, or if a grid being displayed doesn’t match the design direction or somehow impedes the function of the site.

I think the easter egg approach as used by Analog is the nicest way. With that said, our grid at http://neutroncreations.com is on proud display in the header, but not further down where we encouraged Elliot Jay Stocks to deliberately emphasise the seemingly chaotic layout, without revealing any order behind it.

Take for example this article on the daily mail website. The original post is written in the context of a warm hearted human interest story, but the comments reveal that the actions taken by the author were stupid and dangerous. Readers who take the time to read the comments of this post get both sides of the story, so to speak.

In this scenario, allowing comments on the post has allowed the author to be further educated about the topic they have written, we see examples of this all the time in tutorial posts, where the author presents one way of solving a problem and the audience can then chip in with their own (and sometimes better) solutions.

I think comments are healthy too. As mentioned above, I can look at metrics in my favorite analytics program, but that doesn’t mean anything. They’re just numbers. But to have another human being take the time to write something in response to something you yourself has written, that can be far more satisfying that 1,000 extra page views.

If there are a small number of comments, being able to subscribe by e-mail (there’s a wordpress plugins for it) that can help keep track of a conversation and keeping bringing you back to the site.

Those are my first couple of thoughts anyway

Ollie

The ‘like’ idea is an interesting one, I might have to implement something like that on this site.