Blog Design

Blog design is an important step in getting repeat traffic to your blog. Don’t worry; you don’t have to be a designer to achieve this. But your blog should be looking neat enough and be easy to navigate through to attract people. There are a few steps we can implement for effective blog design and in my eyes it starts with good colors. The blog site should be easy on the eye. I personally get turned of blogs that have too many flashy banners and are too cluttered. Blog design start with writing down a rough sketch of how you want your blog to look like.

To do this you will need to decide what you want to blog about. Is it product specific, is it industry specific, or is your blog going to be a niche blog? Once you know what you want you can get started by breaking it down into features. What do you like to show on your blog? Articles, quick blurbs, pictures or video? This is important for your blog design. It’s like building a house. You don’t start to lay the foundations before you got the house designed on paper. Much like building a house, things always change along the way. The same will happen for your blog’s design.

Changing your design is much easier, when the blog is relative new. If your are looking to change from plugin’s to widgets, some of your sidebar can disappear when you implement this. So thinking about the blog and its design is crucial to having to change too many things later down the track. You will want to look at the following:

• Templates; there are virtually thousands out there and all though it is easy to change templates later on, it will be better if you did this before the blog got too big.
• Color scheme; using colors that complement each other are important. Also stick to 3 colors max and make sure they are easy on the eye. Try to stay away from fluorescent colors too, they simply look garish.
• Categories/Pages; what are the main categories/pages of your blog? Try to choose them as being related to your topics.
• Plugin’s or widgets or both?
• Social book marking icons; they are very web 2.0 and are essential these days if you want to keep traffic. As they make it easy for anybody to subscribe to your blog updates, they are an absolute must of blog design.
• Text; too often I come across blogs that use some fancy text nobody can read. Stick to the most common ones like Arial or Times New Roman.
• Comments feature; do you want to allow others to comment on your blog? If you do, make sure you tick the relevant features in your blogs admin.

These suggestions are but a few to get you started in the right direction of effective blog design. The secret to making in work from the beginning is to do a bit of planning up front. If you visit other blogs, I’m sure you will see some nice blog designs that catch your eyes. Often if you scroll down the page you will be able to see what template they are using. This way you will get some nice ideas for a blog that is designed right.