Principles for Good Blog Design, pt 2

help4 – To reiterate… Some of your blog posts are going to be more popular than others. Once you recognize which blog posts these are, keep them from being buried by finding a way to highlight them. You may have a popular posts section in the sidebar of your blog, for example, keeping these specific blog posts from getting lost in the shuffle. Another option is to have a popular articles section in your sidebar where you list your most popular blog posts so that readers can continue to find them. You can also tag or categorize blog posts to reflect their popularity so readers can go back and easily find them later.

5 – Do not make a blog banner that is big or unwieldy. The banner is the top portion of your blog, spanning across from right to left. There is a lot of information that you can put here, like a graphic, the name of your blog or even your picture. If your blog banner is too big, and someone who is reading your blog has to scroll down in order to find your content, then its time to make a change. Your blog banner and how readable your content is are two details that will make or break your blog when people visit for the first time.

6 – Make sure that your blog is visually appealing. If you cannot come up with a design that screams “visual appeal!”, at least make sure that your blog is not ugly. You should avoid bright colors or seriously contrasting colors, and you should stick to fonts that are reasonable, such as Arial and Times New Roman. If you are looking for something with a little bit of flair, Calibri is a good choice as well. Once you are done, let a professional designer look your blog over and give you feedback before you start taking things live, because what looks okay to you may not look okay to the rest of the world.

7 – Get rid of anything that isn’t serving a purpose. If you have random widgets and other junk in your blog sidebars and they’re not serving any real purpose, get rid of them. Blogs can become too busy really quickly, and one, two or three sidebars can quickly become too much. Go through every widget and remove the ones that aren’t benefiting you or your readers in some way. Cut down on the clutter, because visual appeal and good blog design are your friends when it comes to attracting readers to your following.

* Keep in mind that not only is empty space allowable, but it can also serve a great purpose because it helps your readers focus on what truly is important: Your content. These concepts are really simple but they pack a punch when it comes to delivering the content your readers want without forcing them to be bogged down by poor blog design.

Photo Credits: 1

Originally posted 2009-02-06 08:20:32. Republished by Blog Post Promoter

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Using Blogger is a Mistake

bvswpBlogger is one of a number of different blogging platforms out there, but it is not the most ideal way to go for most blogging purposes. While there are benefits to using blogger when you are just starting out when it comes to blogging, using blogger is a mistake later on when you are trying to grow and develop your blog. Not only is blogger not ideal because it is a hosted blog that you do not have as much control over, but there are also a number of features that some blogging platforms offer that blogger hasn’t even come close to offering. The reason why blogging platforms like WordPress are considered to be ideal is because WordPress offers a number of extremely important features that Blogger isn’t making available yet.

First of all, you can set a WordPress blog up to automatically ping RSS and blog feed directories each and every time that you make a blog post. This is an extremely powerful blogging feature, at least if you are looking to generate a large amount of traffic for your blog right away. On top of this, because WordPress will be doing all of the pinging for you, you will be creating a lot of automatic backlinks to your blog almost instantaneously.

Think about how long it would normally take you to build a website, get the search engines to pay attention to it, earn backlinks from other pages to improve your search engine listings and to start earning traffic. Instead of having to do all of this work yourself, consider creating a WordPress blog that will do all of the work for you automatically.

Secondly, WordPress allows the use of categories, which are a really powerful way for you to improve the structure of your website, not only for human visitors but also for search engines as well. If the main topic of your website is widgets, for example, then you can create a category for blog posts about black widgets, another category for green widgets, and finally a category for orange widgets. Then when you add posts to your blog, you can decide which categories the post belongs to. Then your blog will automatically archive all of your posts not only by the month and the date but also by the category that the post most closely corresponds to.

If you have a visitor that is especially interested in widgets of a certain color then, they can easily find all of your posts on that particular subject rather than having to go through all of your archives to find a certain post.

WordPress and other similar blogging platforms offer a wide variety of additional options and features that Blogger simply cannot offer. While blogger is an excellent jumping off point for brand new blogs in certain situations, it is by no means a good answer on a long term basis.

Photo Credits: 1

Originally posted 2009-02-04 05:50:54. Republished by Blog Post Promoter

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