8 Tips On Blog Design

I’m going to speak here primarily about Wordpress themes since Wordpress is the platform I use and understand the most. When I first started, I didn’t know anything about what made a theme effective and impressionable to my readers. No really, I am not kidding. The first version of my Informant Zone theme had the look and feel of Miami Vice. Yes, the color scheme was pink and teal.

Despite my blog reaching a Google page rank of 4 with the Miami Vice theme, I wasn’t retaining long term readers. Gee, I wonder why. So it was high time I learned a thing or two of what a successful blog design was composed of and here is what I came up with.

1. The overuse of banners and Adsense creates a very stressful overall feel and look. Blogs which appear to have more advertising than content tend to perform very poorly. The point of a blog is to remain focused on content. That is why I read other blogs. To find out information that I wish to know about – not to look at advertising.
2. 3 column theme designs really need to be used with caution otherwise they make a blog look cluttered. Used correctly though they can be effective. I haven’t seen many instances of this though. The John Chow.com theme works well because the 3 columns only appear on the front page while the posts are reduced to 2 columns.
3. You do not necessarily need tons of flash graphics (or any types of graphics for that matter) on your site to gain attention. I personally steer away from going to sites with tons of graphics period. Some of the most successful blogs out there use very minimal graphics at best. Sites loaded with art (unless you are a site based on art) tend to load slow and not rank so well with search engines.
4. Do not be gadget happy. Adding things like a Google page rank checker, world clock and other interactive widgets only reduces the attention paid to your content. After all, you are writing your content to have it noticed aren’t you?
5. Plugins such as Top Commentators, Related Posts, Popular Posts and social bookmarking buttons all add to your blog’s sociability. So use them and make it interactive and known. The SexyBookmarks Wordpress plugin can provide you with buttons such as the ones I have at the bottom of your articles.
6. Color schemes come in a wide variety and no Wordpress theme is worse than one with a wide variety of colors. Try to keep it to a minimum of 2, 3 if you really have to and can incorporate the third color wisely. Unless your blog is meant to showcase the opening introductions of each season of In Living Color, I suggest you stay away from a myriad of colors. Oh and don’t go with the Miami Vice colors either!
7. Try to at least have your subscribe to RSS icon in a prominently visible position for everyone to see. If I can’t find the icon quickly, I don’t bother subscribing.
8. Music that plays immediately when a visitor arrives at your blog is annoying. I don’t even recommend doing it even if you provide a “mute” option. Only enable music on your site if it does not automatically play when someone loads the page but rather allows them to turn it on from a small noticeable panel if you really must have it on your blog. I tried adding the Miami Vice sound track to my first blog and other than the Phil Collins song “In The Air Tonight” my readers were up in arms.

With this information in mind, I hope you are able to use it to your advantage and build a more functional blog. Just remember that people like clean and structured looking blogs. Blog readers tend to surf fast and if they cannot find what they are searching for in a timely manner, they leave. Since I made some tweaks to my own blog, I noticed that the time spent on each of my pages increased substantially.

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