Eight simple and effective tips for blog design

“To me a recipe needs to look appealing to eat first. Taste comes second.”

The design of your Blog is a two edged sword. You have to maintain a fine balance between the looks and aesthetics versus the size and load times. A good design does not be heavy on graphics but rather be pleasing to the eyes. You can make your blog stand just by being creative. The point here is to grab your reader’s attention and hold it.

Today we are flooded with so many blogs. Just name a topic and you have a blog on it. But a lot of them are cluttered, ugly and sometimes even repulsive. You should be thankful to these blogs, because it gives you a chance to differentiate yourself.

It is understandable that not all are web designers here. But it does not give an excuse for them to make such bad looking blogs. It is disappointing because, they put all their work to go waste. Unable to grab visitor’s attention means losing out potential market.

With so many themes, plug-in, widgets, tutorials and other resources available for free on the web, you don’t need to have advance Photoshop skills to design your blog. A simple task of deciding what components to use and where to place it would suffice.

1. KISS

Keep It Simple, Stupid – The golden rule of designing anything is keeping the focus on simplicity and ease of use. Present your audience with an appealing design, not necessary an eye catching one.

2. Designing the layout

Take a piece of paper and pencil, start designing the layout of the site on it. Make use of boxes to visualize the site components. Don’t go into much detail, just focus on where to place navigation menu, tags, title, ads, comments etc.

Once you are done, you have a rough estimate of how your site going to be structured. Now you can go by searching themes on the web for your Content Management System / Blogging Software or even start from scratch.

3. Focus on Topic Name and Content

Do understand that a reader comes to your blog for your post and not to see your graphic skills (Unless it’s a blog on graphic designing). Three most important things for the reader are: BLOGNAME, TOPIC TITLE and CONTENT.

Focus on these three things and your half job is done. BLOGNAME is generally placed at the top of the blog, so it is the first thing visible to your reader. TOPIC TITLE and CONTENT should be laid out well to make it easily readable.

4. Use pleasant Color Combination

Although what color to choose is extremely subjective, a few pointers can help ease your task.

• Professional topics demand a neat and elegant layout with pleasing / soothing colors
• Blogs catering to entertainment, fashion and topics related to youth can be experimental with use of bright colors
• Blogs about graphic and designing does well if it is creatively laid out with fresh and vibrant colors (shades of blue, orange and green)
• Certain colors combine pretty well. Find those combinations and used them well in your content, content background, page background, links, sidebars etc. Try out http://www.colorcombos.com/
• Avoid using contrasting or flashy colors. They though make things stand out, are often irritating to the reader’s eye.

5. Use Simple Navigation Style

Now we come to the part, where we focus on how to retain your first time visitor. Navigation forms an important part of it. You should have an effective navigation system placed on your website. Most of the Content Management System or Blogs powered by WordPress have excellent navigation controls build into them.

Do remember the purpose of navigation control is to provide the reader easy way to move from one portion of the site to another. Breadcrumb view and Drop down view are popular navigation styles. It is better to stick one of the popular styles as readers are habituated to it. Also avoid flash navigation modules, as search engines have difficulty understanding them.

6. Make effective use of tags to assist navigation

Once a site grows with content, the navigation system proves inadequate to let user easily move through it. Cases happen mostly with blogs and sites with a lot of articles writer in it.

Tags are words or groups of words associated with a particular page (blog or article) of a site. But the main problem with tagging is how to present it in a way easily accessible to the readers.

Tag Cloud is a wonderful way to do it. Tag Clouds is ideally placed in the sidebar or towards the upper section of the site within confine boundaries to assist users with quick navigation. Refrain from having too large a section devoted to it and vice versa.

Tag Cloud Definition: A tag cloud (or weighted list in visual design) can be used as a visual depiction of content tags used on a website

7. Use of images

Images assist for making great visual representation. However they are also heavy on the bandwidth compare to text. Thus they increase the page load times, which may rebound users on low bandwidth or dial ups.

Another thing to keep in mind is the image should gel well with the colors used on the blog. If you want a particular background which does not gel with your blog’s color scheme, then you have to choose one over the other.

8. Synergy

Finally, a well designed blog always is the one that blends all the designing aspects well and makes for a great read. They say “Content is the King” agreed but “A King looks better with his crown”. OK my bad example, sorry but you get the point.