Wednesday, February 9, 2011

9 Guidelines When Designing Your Blog






After you have created your Blog and have thought out the Complete Marketing of your Blog, you might have checked the keywords, traffic, the quality of your post and many other factors. Here is one Key that can greatly change responses from your visitors: Web Design.

Web Design is often underestimated for its strong influence to users and its easy to say why: we equate web design to any nice flashy presentation. What we failed to perceive is that there is a strong logic to the buttons, text and picture, even positions that this objects have on the screen. For some companies, it had even spelled disaster.

9 Guidelines when Designing your Blog:
1.     Design Matters.
Many people discount just how important design is. They say, “if the content is there, people will come to read it”. Not always true. A lot of comment-ers said that if they stumbled onto 1 or 2 of the designs they would have left immediately. Design matters folks!

2.     Sometimes Less is More.
 If something is too busy, it takes away from the overall effect of a design. I had this problem with Smart Passive Income in a previous blog redesign. It was a three column design and it just had too much going on.

3.     Fonts play a big role.
To be more specific – cheesy fonts in the header can give off the worst first impression, and we all know how important first impressions are on the Internet.

4.     Colors Give Off Different Sensations.
 Here’s a good article that examines the colors of business and what they mean to an audience.

5.     Blog Author Pictures.
A picture of the blog author on the homepage, above the fold, is an easy way to help a design become personalized and unique. Also, readers like to know who is ‘speaking’ to them, and a face is far more memorable than anything else.

6.     Literal Imagery.
“Obvious designing” – or in other words, including imagery that is too literal, can sometimes have a negative effect. For example, your site is about money. The idea of actual dollar bills being spread across the header might not appeal to most people.

7.     Understand your Readers.
Figure out what you want your readers to do, and make that a primary focal point on your page. For example, if you really want people to subscribe to your newsletter, create a nice looking graphic that stands out from the rest of the page. On my blog, I tried to do this by not only having a high-quality graphic next to my opt-in form, but I had the graphic also poke out of the edge a little.

8.     Logo Visibility.
A logo can be a great way to immediately define your brand and stand out from the crowd. It is fundamental to have a brandable logo and to have good logo visibility all throughout the Site.

9.     You cannot Please Everybody.
Everyone has their own opinions about what they like and no matter how much time you spend on your design or how many suggestions from others you incorporate, there will always be people who think something can be done better. Take the suggestions that you like and implement those. Then, just pull the trigger and go with it. The worst thing you can do is keep tweaking a design or just sitting on it wondering if it’s “the one”.

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